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Her Majesty's Mirth
In search of Brit laughs at the Edinburgh Fringe
28 August 2002

Comedy on the Royal Mile at
the Edinburgh Fringe

Expats, no matter where they live in the world, always wish they could pack some small aspect of home in their suitcases before boarding the plane. As a British journalist living in San Francisco for the past two years, I frequently have to deal with unmanageable cravings for real Cadbury's chocolate (not the unpalatable impostor made by Hershey and sold under the Cadbury name), country pubs, and even, on occasion, rain.

Lately what I have been missing more than anything is the British sense of humor. Seinfeld and Six Feet Under are all well and good, but when it comes to comedy, there's nothing like a well-turned British pun, a droll British put-down, or an off-beat British sketch, preferably involving a parrot and a man in a bowler hat.

Anyone who knows about comedy will tell you that the place to find Britain's funniest people is the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. So to slake my thirst for a few familiar jokes, I boarded a plane for Scotland.

For those unfamiliar with the Edinburgh Fringe, it's a performing arts shindig of epic proportions. The largest arts festival in the world by a long stretch, this year's event (which lasted three weeks and ended several days ago) included 20,342 individual dance, theater, comedy, music (opera, pop, classical, jazz) performances by more than 11,000 artists at 183 venues all over the city.

The Fringe has long been viewed as an untidy appendage to the high profile ¿ and largely conservative ¿ Edinburgh International Festival. While for years the Fringe tended to attract young, amateur groups and solo performers at the start of their careers, in recent times it has become an important stopover point for professional companies and artists from all over the world. Most significantly, the Fringe is the highlight of the British comedy calendar.

The British take their laughs very seriously. The U.K. comedy circuit is growing every year, with famous London comedy clubs like Jongleurs spreading as far afield as Glasgow and promoters like Mirth Control setting up new markets. "Every major city in the U.K. has some kind of comedy circuit within it," said Rachel Hennessy, who programs comedy at one of Edinburgh's major arts venues, the Pleasance. "Promoters who came to the festival with five clients last year have come back with fifteen this year."

The Fringe has long played a major role in promoting new comedy ¿ Billy Connolly, Emma Thompson, and Eddie Izzard all launched their careers at the festival. This year comedy shows accounted for roughly a quarter of the entire Fringe program, and at last year's festival 38 percent of all tickets sold were for comedy shows; a popular stand-up comedian like Ross Noble can expect to make $80,000 in ticket sales over a three-week run. It's big business. Martin Reynolds, press and marketing manager for the festival, said, "Hundreds of television producers and scouts flock to the city to either pilot artists' new material or sign up new faces. A number of extremely well-publicized comedy awards heighten this profile."

The crown jewel of comedy prizes is the Perrier Award, launched in 1981. There are a number of prizes for comedy at the Fringe, but the Perrier is to British comedy what the Pulitzer is to writing and the Nobel to peace. (Incidentally, the prize is also open to foreigners: Bay Area comedian Scott Capurro made it to the short list in 1995.) Previous winners, such as Steve Coogan, Graham Norton, and Lee Evans, have all gone on to big things since winning the prize. "The Perrier Award helps launch you onto a bigger platform," veteran Scottish stand-up comedian Janey Godley said. "It provides a leg up."

As a result of the buzz around Fringe comedy, you're as likely to catch some of the country's most established comics, filling major venues and selling out weeks in advance, as you are tomorrow's heroes, doing their first, shaky stand-up routines in seedy Edinburgh bars. However, as the Fringe is a massive free-for-all, where anyone who can stump up the cash to rent space in a venue can perform, you're very likely to emerge from some shows in a daze, wondering whether you could have better spent the ticket money on toilet paper.

Indeed, at this year's Fringe, I enjoyed the best and endured the worst of British comedy. What the Fringe loses in quality, it more than makes up for in terms of variety and quantity. I've seen it all: penis contortionists, comedians who combine comedy with opera, and comedians who fly about on magic carpets.

As the British actor-manager Sir Donald Wolfit once famously quipped, "Dying is easy, comedy is hard," and judging by the difficulty some of the comedians at this year's Fringe had in making me laugh, he was not wrong. After all, a sense of humor is such a personal thing: How many times have I sat stony-faced in a theater when people all about me are falling off of their chairs with mirth? And how many times have I split my sides, only to be met by the hollow echo of my own inane giggle?

I suppose what I personally look for in a comedian is his or her ability not only to make me laugh but also to tell me something new. Or at least to tell me something I already know in a new way. Alas, all too often, stand-up acts at the Fringe follow this painful formula: 1) Comedian walks onstage. 2) Comedian spends half an hour asking members of the audience where they come from and cracking weak jokes about that part of the world, as in, "Is there anyone in the house tonight from America?" Silence. "Good." 3) Comedian makes fun of any or all of the following: the latest series of the Big Brother television show, Posh Spice and David Beckham, Americans. 4) Comedian walks offstage.

It's not only mediocre stand-ups that threaten to destroy the high international reputation for British comedy that the likes of Oscar Wilde, the Goons, and Monty Python worked so hard to build. Perhaps the most depressing evening I spent all month was at an improvised comedy show by a group of overenthusiastic Edinburgh University undergraduates who called themselves the Improverts. It didn't matter that I'd drunk half a bottle of wine before the start; it still wasn't funny. If the Improverts represent the future of British comedy, then I'm staying in San Francisco.

Having said that, there are reasonable grounds to believe there is a bright future for British comedy. While some commentators have complained about the paucity of political content and the dearth of female stand-ups in this year's lineup, visitors to the Fringe are still largely impressed with what they're seeing. "British comedy is in pretty good shape," said William Higham, who visits the festival regularly and enjoys going to famous comedy clubs like the Banana Cabaret and the Comedy Store when he's in London. "As long as there's a critical mass of well-known venues in the big cities, the performers will get the support and exposure they need." Happily, I, too, had occasion to get excited about British comedy over the past month. Having yawned my way through such trendy A-list comedians as Dan Antopolski and Craig Hill, it was refreshing to discover some amazingly talented people performing in the largely ignored, rickety old church halls and damp cellars at the fringes of the Fringe.

The Perrier judges probably wouldn't dream of heading down a back alley in the middle of the night to see Schhh! Theatre Company perform their topsy-turvy sketch show Christmas Tree or the Consultants, a trio of wide boys in their late 20s, doing their poorly named but extremely astute revue Finger in the Wind. It's a shame the Perrier crowd don't cast their comedy nets wider ¿ they're missing out on laughs.

On the stand-up front, a comedian called Andr³ Vincent impressed me the most. Among a slew of funnymen and -women including the Anglo-Iranian comic Omid Djalili and New Yorker Tina C., who both spent the entire summer making jokes about Sept. 11, with varying degrees of success, Vincent tackled another difficult subject with originality, hilarity, and a complete lack of sentimentality: his fight against kidney cancer.

In Andr³ Vincent Is Unwell, he cleverly dissected his own experience on the operating table, recalling with fascinating detail every aspect of being ill, from his diagnosis to what the comedian would have us believe is the biggest joke in the British Health Service: aftercare.

Stopping en route to tell us about his South Park-patterned pajamas, his experiences at a sperm bank, and his grandmother's answer to every ailment, broccoli, Vincent smattered his narrative with neurotic statistics, from the chances he has of dying of cancer (0.03 percent) to the fact that there are more than 350,000 cancer diaries on the Internet.

What separates this stand-up comedian from anyone else who thinks they can find humor in a tumor is his ability to sustain a single narrative for more than an hour with malignant wit. Unlike comics who meander off the subject never to return, Vincent stuck to his difficult story like a growth to the kidneys; his diversions were only temporary. That night I laughed a great deal and learned something new.

During the festival I sat through some 50 comedy shows in pursuit of an elusive concept known as the "British sense of humor." Did I find it? Hell, no. Can a nation's laughing formula be reduced to a few equations? Judging by the rainbow parade of jongleurs touting their wares at this year's Fringe, I would say that this is impossible. If the U.K. ever had a national comic identity, it went down the chute with the Empire decades ago.

National identity is, to a large degree, imposed on a country by people looking in from the outside. One could argue that Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville played as great a part in forging the image of America as Ford Motors, Southern fried chicken, and Friends.

Unsurprisingly, the only people who were able to offer me any insight into the character of British comedy were from abroad. "We don't have a culture of stand-up comedy," said a friend of a friend who was visiting Edinburgh from Brazil. "To the British, stand-up is everything."

Perhaps the only overarching characteristic of comedy in Britain is its infinite variety ¿ an attribute entirely supported by the zoolike Fringe. For George Peøa, an American comedian performing at the Fringe who grew up in the south Bronx and has toured the U.K. extensively, British comedy is defined by the fact that no two parts of the tiny island seem to find the same thing funny.

"Whether you do comedy in Los Angeles or in New York, two cities that are thousands of miles apart, people will laugh at the same things," he says. "But in the U.K., things that make the northerners laugh, don't make the southerners laugh at all."