Laughing Yourself Sick
31 August 2002

Watching the usual parade of penis contortionists, lesbian dwarf cabaret singers and one-legged, necrophiliac performance poets at this year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival, one is left feeling, as ever, that humankind ran out of things to say about human genitalia, terminal illness and the Taliban years ago.

Yet among the barrage of comedians at this year's Fringe who put bums on seats on the basis of their claims to break down taboos, there are two who actually accomplish what they set out to do.

Trevor Stuart and Andr³ Vincent are typical, in some ways, of what you'd expect to find at the Fringe. At the start of his show Taboo, Mr. Stuart makes his entrance in a strait-jacket, dragging a ghetto blaster along on a skateboard by means of a piece of string tied to his penis. Meanwhile, in Andr³ Vincent Is Unwell, Mr. Vincent spends an hour cracking jokes about his battle against cancer.

There's nothing unusual about Mr. Stuart and Mr. Vincent's choice of subject matter. In fact, the tradition of sadomasochistic and critical-illness-based comedy goes back a long way.

In 1989, supermasochist Bob Flanagan nailed his penis to a plank in a performance curated by a Los Angeles bookstore. More recently, The Jim Rose Circus, a modern day freak show, has achieved worldwide notoriety with its roster of Mexican transvestite wrestlers and underwater escapologists.

On the cancer front, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore created entire comedy routines on the subject. And when Tom Green, a popular MTV comedian, succumbed to testicular cancer in 2000, he made jokes about it.

As is the case with all good comedy, it's not a question of what bodily fluids Mr. Stuart and Mr. Vincent choose to spill all over a paying audience, but how they choose to spill them.

You would think that a performer who slaughtered 250 soft toys filled with blood under the auspices of the Serpentine Gallery in 1992 wouldn't need an excuse for injecting heroin into a four-foot prosthetic penis, juggling dripping sheep brains and demanding personal information about orgasms from members of the audience.

Yet In Taboo, Mr. Stuart assaults the crowd from behind the disguise of a deranged patient posturing as a psychiatrist. This unashamedly cheap theatrical device gives the good doctor a license to exploit every uncomfortable subject in the most uncompromising ways.

Taking a didactic stance on bodily functions, dirt, sex and illicit secrets, Mr. Stuart pokes a finger into every tightly-puckered crevice, pulls it out, sniffs it and then sticks it down the audience's throat, putting the human retching reflex through its paces.

The secret to Mr. Stuart's success as a grand manipulator of audience sensibilities, stems not so much from the depths to which he willingly plunges in the cesspool of profanity, as from his performance skills. His bizarre stunts and phantasmagoric wit, which simultaneously evoke a Victorian fairground attraction and an Artaudian happening, are all delivered with the impeccable timing and physical accuracy that belies his training at the Etienne Decroux mime school. There's simply no knowing what he'll do next.

Meanwhile, in the cancer ward of a hospital in a particularly unsalubrious quarter of North London, Mr. Vincent is also wondering what will happen to him next. Having been diagnosed with diabetes following a 46-hour drinking binge during the 2000 Edinburgh Fringe, at last year's Festival, he started pissing blood and went to hospital with cancer of the kidney.

In Andr³ Vincent Is Unwell, the recently resurrected Mr. Vincent cleverly dissects his own experience on the operating table, recalling, with fascinating detail, every aspect of the process of being ill, from his diagnosis to what the comedian would have us believe is the biggest joke in the NHS - aftercare.

Stopping en route to tell us about his South Park-patterned pyjamas, his experiences at a sperm bank and his grandmother's answer to every ailment - broccoli, Mr. Vincent smatters his narrative with statistics that only a career-invalid would know, from the chances he has of dying of cancer (0.03%) 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 humour in a tumour, is his ability to sustain a single narrative for over an hour with malignant wit. Unlike other comics who meander off the subject, often never to return, Mr. Vincent sticks to his difficult story like a growth to the kidneys.

The Fringe isn't like watching television: you can't hop channels and you can't switch it off. While those with weaker constitutions might wish Mr. Stuart and Mr. Vincent would crawl back to the wards from whence they came, these two comedians deftly prove there's still mirth and meaning in a sick mind and body.

Copyright 2002 The Economist