F E S T I VA L C O M E DY | Nick Helm
F or a man who needs to gently rest his voice and relax his body in between performances of his bombastic solo work, it’s mildly concerning that Nick Helm has two shows doing full runs at this year’s Fringe. Phoenix from the Flames is the first August-long stand-up show he’s given us since 2013’s One Man Mega Myth (his second hour to receive an Edinburgh Comedy Award nomination) while I Think, You Stink! is the resurrection of a musical horror comedy thingy he wrote and laid on in 2008 at the all-too appropriately named Bedlam Theatre.
First things first, that comma feels fairly crucial doesn’t it? ‘There is a comma there, yes,’ freely admits Helm. ‘And there’s an exclamation mark. So, maybe it should be pronounced as “I Think” [pause] “YOU STINK!” I wanted to very much emphasise the point between “I Think” and “You Stink”, so at the time the comma was very important because it controls the way the reader reads it. It’s really just about my need to be a control freak so much that I control even the way that a stranger who has just come across a poster for a show reads and digests the info from it. Let’s give it a positive spin: it’s part of the creative process.’ Another positive Helm can glean from that 2008 run is that he claims (and we have no real evidence to doubt him) that I Think, You Stink! is the only show which has made him any money during the Fringe: the princely sum of £50. ‘I thought that I’d like to do this horror- themed poetry show but as it all came together, I started writing more songs, so then it became more of a musical with a couple of poems in. I found it hard to describe what it was, so I started calling it an anthology horror: they’re individual stories, a collection of horror scenes,
48 THE LIST FESTIVAL 31 Jul–7 Aug 2019