FESTIVAL FEATURES | Alan Warner
WHO IS KILLING THE FRINGE COMEDIANS OF EDINBURGH?
I am.
Three years on, two dead comedians. ‘Stand ups’ as they like to call them. They weren’t standing up by the time we had i nished with them. My beautiful assistant – my fair companion, Girl Called Tidy and me. We buried the i rst in the corner of a ploughed i eld – I couldn’t believe the tractors didn’t gouge him out the following Spring. I used to dream about his hand peeping out the topsoil under a crescent moon, but that stopped. It just shows you that farming has gone to the dogs in East Lothian. As well as police work – contrary to popular culture. The other one, we tossed him off last year. Tossed him off the side of a coastal bridge in Sutherland with no CCTV. Shows you the i shing has gone to pot as well. That was a long and less-than-fragrant drive in the old VW camper, I can assure you. I’d liked to have propped him up with my sunglasses on, despite the weather – but we just couldn’t. The lips and that.
Girl Called Tidy shows me the Social Media stuff on her coloured phone, Twittify and all that. A Capital city comedy circuit rapt, avid and lumpen in its excitements and of course the comedians can’t resist in-jokes about the recurring ‘disappearances’, trying to cash in on grief as a source of mirth as ever.
Members of the police force can now be seen outside conference halls and stadia where the most famous Stand Ups perform. The ones you’ve all paid a bit towards on account of your overpriced TV licence fee. If we popped a famous one we’d know all about it, but we don’t. Especially not that pub landlord guy – I’ve nothing against him. He’s all right he is. It’s the up-and-coming chortle brigade that clearly, nobody cares about; that vast coni guration of duelling reputations, mutting about, looking for their big break and a bottle of Perrier – what a prize! Waiting for their Eddie Buzzard moment with dashing cheetahs.
The forge of the comedians is like a sort of hellish Russian civil service back in old Dostoyevsky’s day; in cramped quarters all serve their apprenticeship under various heads of department down the tunnels of advancement and retreat, through the many-limbered beast of the comedy world they go, a l op of intestines with lower and higher digestive tracts, dead-end culverts of blocked colon and appendix. That’s the up-and-coming joke circuit. Circuit! I haven’t tried electrocution yet. I don’t really listen to their jokes any more, we’re way beyond all that. How can you take anyone seriously – how can you be respectful of their needs when all they want is to hear your laughter? How can anyone be so sad as to want to hear nothing but laughter from everyone else? If you ask me they’re all certii ably nuts.
*
I was seated in Venue one million and seventy trillion before another funny man. I was positioned to the fore, ready for the latest crummy colloquy for losers. There were so few people – trussed up in yet another church hall annexe to some glum quadrant – the audience was so small that God Himself wasn’t even in attendance. Yet still, those familiar movements occurred around me; that seated aggregation were at it – slightly grudging, I do admit – as if trying to loosen and disgorge a lodged bolus from their gullets, the audience members jerked their upper torsos in their white plastic bucket chairs. Backwards and forwards they went, their horrid face- holes open, lips of the mouth displayed their: ‘handy removable features.’ Teeth showed. Their skin tightened at the sides of their faces.
If you listened carefully just before the looming punch- line, you could hear the ‘handy removable features’ slap apart like a carrier bag of water dropped from the roof. They masticated away in that tired church annexe, its hard
air i lled with the melancholy of dusty curtains. Worst of all, those in tandem with ghastly partners, turned with wettened eyes – one to the other and yet back once again in a broody communion of smugness and obedience, then attention was returned to the on-stage comic. The warm- up act of two, worst luck. Warm up! I hadn’t tried burning one yet. I knew what was going on around me, what this prim, glandular seepage was; this spasm of the struthonians. It was called: laughter, and I hated it.
I tried to open my ears to the heart of the matter which was occurring up there on the stage, the skinny young man talking into the microphone and running his hand through his hair as he tried to draw us in to the proximity of his banal world view, but it was impossible for me. Did I use the term: Stage? It was just a small platform of black chipboard set in the corner, slightly raised off the annexe l oorboards by a criss-crossing network of silver rods and sawed-off planks which were jimmied in – no cosmetic panel had been placed upon the frontage so that other set of prima donnas, the sparkies, could run microphone and amplii er wires in beneath. I refuse to recognise the social structure of the stage’s authority. I think.
I shot my hand up like we used to back in primary
school, Please Sir, Please Sir, Me Sir.
‘Hoi,’ I yelled, ‘You remind me of my sister. She’s called
Archie.’
The comedian halted his monologue and turned to look
at his heckler.
In an unexamined superiority, my beautiful assistant had pushed me to the very front row of the seating and as ever, no one had challenged this. I knew I was smiling. You see the look in the artistes’ eyes each time I am disguised like this: my nutters’ plus prescription glasses, my Massey Ferguson tractor tattoos on my big biceps, the skull a number one razor cut. They want to call me Little Britain but know they dare not. Besides, with a classy chassis like Tidy shoving me around, it throws them. Just move around the gender lines a little and you have them confused.
‘I’ve wet my pants laughing at ya,’ I told this microphone- clutcher, in a much more negotiated, pleading voice. His routine grounded, he looked at me from that slight podium while the entire audience stared at me too. Their lips had changed shape to disgust. Good that I never wash at the boathouse. Girl Called Tidy had been standing at the back, by the exit door, and she gave the pilgrim a few more explicit seconds of agony before she made her entrance and stroppily marched forwards, Croydon facelift smacked back as if hit by a slipstream, big gold hoop earrings batted out like penguin wings. She made me proud that lassie, and she adored murder.
‘Oh, okay,’ the wizzle stated, off-mike, as if I were a mere and momentary tech-hitch, a squeak in his amplii er thingmy, and he did look over towards the true master of ceremony – the eternal wee sound man. Girl Called Tidy grabbed the handles of my wheelchair and commenced to violently manoeuvre me round even though there wasn’t enough space in the aisle.
‘Ohh quick, I need ma toilet,’ I wheedled. Tidy yelled, ‘You’re just a dirty, dirty old man. We need
to go get that catheter straight back in.’
Other smurfs were jumping up now and scraping aside their chairs in an effort to make clear a passage through for my promenade. I grinned at a blooming girl with an unusual face. I couldn’t say in what way it was unusual – it just was, take my word for it. ‘This is my social worker,’ I told them all. The girl with
the unusual face smiled at me.
‘I use a strap-on with her.’ Tidy crashed me up the aisle, my tyres caught and toppled some drinks that the celebrants had placed on the l oor by their white plastic chair legs. Not even beer: soda or even bloody tea! I whooped with joy though all those white chairs were playing havoc with my beaming hangover. We were almost at the door when the comedian
22 THE LIST FESTIVAL 14–25 Aug 2014