Festival Comedy
Stand-up for America
As a quartet of notable north Americans finally make their Fringe debuts, Claire Sawers chats to four very different characters hellbent on making a big impression
Jennifer Coolidge 20 THE LIST 5–12 Aug 2010
J ennifer Coolidge is having trouble describing her own stand-up show. She asks a friend who is within shouting distance for help. ‘Michael?’ she calls, in a sugary purr. ‘I have Scotland on the line. What’s my show like?’ After a pause an answer booms back. ‘Outrageous? Silly. All over the place. And dirty.’
In other words, not a million miles away from the film and TV roles you may know Coolidge from. In American Pie, she played Stifler’s mum, a filthy-minded, amply fun-bagged older woman, and the original ‘MILF’. Blonde and ditzy became Coolidge’s stock in trade, with variations into suicidal (as seen in Sex and the City, where she played an unhinged handbag designer), geeky (see Paulette, the beauty in parlour Legally Blonde) and gold-digging (for Best in Show, as Jane Glee Lynch’s poodle-loving girlfriend). clutz
‘I’ve played a lot of crazy characters, sure,’ she explains. ‘But in comedy, you never want to play the normal person, it’s just not fun.’ The weirdness is normally where the funny lurks too, believes Coolidge, who has become Christopher character- actress-on-call, with roles in mockumentaries including A Mighty Wind. ‘Most of my stand-up is about LA weirdos, or how strange it is being on the Guest’s
road. There’s some filthy stories in there too – people who expect some Disney-clean show, or Cinderella happy-ending may be shocked,’ she laughs.
Coolidge is one of four notable north American comedians coming to this year’s Fringe for the first time, and if she’s ‘The Smutty Cougar’ one, then she should perhaps be kept separated from ‘The YouTube Prodigy’, aka fresh-faced 19-year-old Bo Burnham. The bairn of the bunch, he started making DIY comedy videos on the internet in 2006, shortly after YouTube launched. His first upload, a touching piano ballad called ‘My Whole Family Thinks I’m Gay’, became a viral hit, and earned him the first of several hundred thousand cyberfans.
‘It’s not like I was the class clown as a kid,’ Burnham explains, his torpid coolness floating down the telephone from Toronto, where he’s about to play the Just for Laughs festival. ‘I was the kid at the back, rolling his eyes at the class clown.’ Born to be wide, Burnham has gone on to write un-PC masterpieces on everything from rape whistles, Anne Frank and Oprah’s presumably fictional crystal meth habit. Rude, articulate and funny in equal measure, Burnham has spent the last three years punting his comedy through Facebook, Twitter and U-Stream, as well as selling albums of his songs through iTunes. But more recently, he’s had to step out of the digital shadows and face real crowds, as he begins touring the real-life comedy circuit. ‘The good thing about the internet is lots of instant feedback,’ Burnham points out. ‘About half the comments I get under my videos are from people who are offended. It keeps you very honest; they’ll pull you up on your flaws immediately.’ For his debut Edinburgh show, he’s dancing skilfully over taboos again, with a brand new batch of material that mixes stand-up, poetry and songs. ‘I’m introducing more puns and wordplay this time, because being shocking for the sake of it, that’s just cheap.’
Less likely to shock, and more likely to bond with you over an anecdote about her child’s accidental swearing, is Caroline Rhea, or ‘The Bubbly Friendly’ one. Most recognisable for her role as aunt Hilda in Sabrina, The Teenage Witch, Rhea is also famous in the States for hosting her own talk show. And boy, can she talk. ‘That’s why I love stand-up,’ she explains. ‘You get to talk and talk, totally uninterrupted, and other people have to listen. It’s kinda like being the guy on the date.’ Her quips come thick and fast, machine-gunned out between stories about her embarrassing 20-month-daughter: ‘She was screaming “Cock!” on the plane