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Fringe 2010 Blog - 17Comedy Misery – Saturday 21 August 2010Week three and things are a little... not down, but certainly less up than they were before. Tiredness is beginning to kick in. Tiredness and being away from home. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve never been someone who feels homesick easily (I don’t know why, it’s just my nature) but I’ve been touring for a long time now. You see, apart from a short break at the beginning of the year, I’ve spent most of the rest of the time from July last year on tour. Whilst there are many, many wonderful things about being in a far away town performing a good play with a great cast, it sometimes begins to wear a little thin. Silly, small things tend to get on your nerves. Things going wrong with the play (nothing the audience would notice but still), technical hitches, aches and pains from the get-in / get-out (kills my back every time), miscommunication between crew and cast or even cast and cast... I’m making it sound like a soap opera! It really isn’t that bad and there haven’t been any major issues, but it’s a trying time for everyone and happens on every tour. Not that we don’t do things to pick ourselves up. On Tuesday night, Sim (our resident lighting dude) cooked a huge stir-fry for everyone at our flat and we all chilled out. It was a tame night when compared to some of the other Edinburgh festival nights, but it was all the better for it. On Wednesday night, the techies at King Dome turned the venue into a cinema. They put up a list of classic and cult films and invited everyone to vote for their favourite film. We ended up watching Spinal Tap on the big screen. It was great and because the evening was organised by the techies, the place actually looked like a cinema. The big screen had a proper border and had artistic yet unintrusive lighting set up on either side of it. People took popcorn and beers and everything was shared around. It was a great evening! Not so great was a show I saw last night. I had gone to watch an early evening show with Debs and Charlie (actress and stage manager respectively). The show was great and afterwards, Charlie and I decided that we wanted to go and see another show. The Pleasance Dome has some late-night comedy shows on, so we decided to try and get in to one of those. The first one we tried was full up. We then went to check out the King Dome, our venue. Outside, we met someone we know who works at the venue, who suggested that we get in to see a comedy show that was about to begin in the adjacent venue. We got in and took a seat. I can honestly say, without a shadow of a doubt, that it was the worst show I have ever seen. This includes all amateur and school shows, impromptu street performances by homeless people, bar fights, drunken singing and magic shows that I used to put on when I was seven. To call it abysmal is an insult to the word. I don’t know how they managed to blag a spot at the Pleasance, but someone, somewhere, at some point made a serious error. It was one of these comedy shows (although I hesitate to call it that), which employs the services of a number of different comedians every night. Basically, what happens is the organiser calls up different comedians and invites them to come along and do a short set, advertising their own show at the same time. All I can say is that this organiser doesn’t know any comedians. The show started off rather badly, with the organiser himself and a mate of his trying to warm up the audience. The mate fared much better than the organiser and could actually have been rather funny... if he hadn’t been constantly interrupted by organiser interjecting very mundane and unimaginative comments! At first I thought that this was their double act; that this is what they do. I was wrong. It was pitifully unfunny. They introduced the first act who played to near silence. Call me crazy but a uttering a series of random rude words in no context at all is not clever or funny. The second act didn’t fare much better. I don’t know who on earth told him he’s funny. He isn’t. Reading the jokes off the wrappers of Penguin Bars was the highlight of his show. Quality, you’ll agree. By the time the third act came on, the audience was rather deflated. Please bear in mind that this was a Friday night audience. These people were out to have a good time. This audience wanted to laugh. This audience was ripe and ready and begging for someone to make them laugh. We were not a tough audience. By the time the third act came on stage, large groups of people were leaving. In between the acts, the two ‘hosts’ would come on stage and speak to us. They joked about how rubbishly organised the show was and about how unfunny everything was turning out to be. Now I’ve seen this done before. It can be rather funny when a comedian or even a show claims to be unfunny and badly organised (Conan O’Brien does it all the time) but it’s only funny if it’s not true! Beneath the shambolic exterior there needs to be a slick, well prepared show. Not in this case. The highlight of the show (and I wish I was making this up, but I’m not) was a young comedian who came on stage, drink in hand, completely unprepared to do a set. Why? Because two minutes before his appearance on stage, he had been quietly having a drink with friends in the bar next door to the venue, not knowing that he was about to go on stage! The show was so badly organised that they didn’t even have enough acts to fill their time slot, and the organiser had to resort to running around the building looking for comedians to put into the show at the last second. This guy, John Robins, came onto the stage still rather unsure of what was happening, and proceeded to do what none of the other so called comedians on the bill could do, namely, make us laugh. He was the only funny person to open their mouth on stage that evening. You might have noticed in these blogs that I never mention the name of a show I didn’t enjoy, mostly because I think that humour is a subjective thing and that others may find funny what I don’t. However, I’m going to make an exception this time because this show is lazy and nasty in the sense that it robs people of the tenner they spent on the ticket. It’s not worth a penny, let alone ten pounds. There is much, much better stuff on the free fringe. I couldn’t find the show on the fringe programme so I can’t recall it’s exact name. It’s something like The Fix, or simply Fix. Finally, in case you think it a little unfair that I say such things about the show, there was a man sitting in front of me who had been to see the previous night’s show. Apparently, it was just as bad. Goodness knows why he returned a second time, but he didn’t stay till the end. He gave up and left half way through. Clever sod. |
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