VICTORY MARCH
Brendon Burns isn’t the only Edinburgh Comedy Award winner showing up in Glasgow. Here’s a quintet of other August victors from the past
Bridget Christie In 2013, Christie became just the third solo female victor of the Edinburgh Comedy Award (whether Hannah Gadsby’s joint triumph last summer will herald an era of more women winners remains to be seen) and her stock continues to rise. She’s here with her post-Brexit show What Now? as she ponders the future of hope amid a landscape of despair. But with jokes. Citizens Theatre, Fri 16 & Sat 17 Mar.
Richard Gadd If solo female acts have failed to register on the ECA winners’ podium down the years, Scottish comics were wholly absent since Arnold Brown’s 1987 win until Fifer Gadd broke the sequence in 2016. Having run himself ragged (mentally and physically) with Monkey See Monkey Do, he’s trailing some new material here. Blackfriars, Sat 17 Mar. Scott Gibson Seconds prior to Gadd being handed the main gong, Glaswegian Gibson laid the foundations for a little bit of Fringe history by lifting the Best Newcomer prize and easing the passage to a unique Scottish double. Anywhere But Here has him retelling the tale of a teenage voyage to Kavos. Saint Luke’s, Fri 16 Mar.
Tommy Tiernan In 1998, Irish stand-up Tiernan was as close to a unanimous winner among the Perrier judges as there was prior or has been since. He’ll be in typically blistering form while Under the Inl uence as he ponders his love of behaving badly. King’s Theatre, Wed 14 Mar.
Bob Slayer Not content with running a number of innovative venues under the Heroes@ banner, Slayer and pals (including Omid Djalili) won the 2016 panel prize for putting on a Fringe-long daily reading of the Chilcot Report in its 2.6 million-word entirety. In Bobby’s Inner Circle, pretty much anything could happen. Blackfriars, Sat 17 Mar.
I t was Brendon Burns’ wife who i rst made the comedian reconsider his attitude to masculinity. Pointing out that the UK-based Australian stand- up has been very open about his attitudes to race on his podcast, Dumb White Guy, why then has he been so guarded when it comes to gender? ‘I thought that was really interesting, so I started talking about it on stage and it became very empowering,’ Burns explains. ‘We’ve only really been looking at racism since the boat was invented; gender is tens of thousands of years of social preconditioning.’
There’s been a seismic shift in gender politics over the past few months, particularly since the fall of Harvey Weinstein and the various men who have been brought down in his wake. But that’s not actually what inspired Burns to write Mansplainin’. ‘It was just the sheer volume of sexual assault,’ he explains, incredulous. ‘On the podcast, instead of addressing race like a lot of comics do by just saying “hey, Farage is a racist!” I think it’s more valuable and interesting, comedically, to ask “when am I racist?” So, when the Weinstein and Louis CK things came about, I got defensive. Then I thought “why the fuck am I defensive? Shouldn’t I be celebrating this”?’ Last year, Burns played the Edinburgh Fringe with Aboriginal Australian comedian Craig Quartermaine in a show called Race Off, a provocative examination of interracial politics and white guilt. The show hung on a twist designed to expose the audience to their own hidden prejudices, albeit with mixed results. ‘The i rst week I had braced myself for the way a certain element of the Edinburgh faithful treats performers of colour, but nothing had quite prepared me for it. If you think the Edinburgh Festival is a liberal, progressive place, just go outside the Soweto Gospel Choir show and listen to the audience coming out.’ He winces at the show’s title. ‘I think we really fucked up calling it Race Off
34 THE LIST 1 Feb–31 Mar 2018
because that audience came to see us. It was one of the most misunderstood and least ambiguous things I’ve ever been involved in and it was the most wilfully misrepresented. But the argument was watertight: we’ve all been brainwashed into normalising whiteness.’ Burns is touring his new show as an independent performer, booking venues where and when he sees i t and organising everything himself. He says he relishes his freedom and that it’s been a long time since he last looked forward to getting back on the road. ‘The i rst date of the tour was in some guy’s lounge room and the audience was about 75% women,’ he remembers. ‘And I turn up with my own PA and microphone and there’s about 50 women in the room as I set up: I’ve never felt more like a stripper in my life.’
Burns is modest but sanguine about his standing, now a decade on from winning the Edinburgh Comedy Award. ‘In this post comedy-boom period, you’re hearing these horror stories of household names playing to 30 people in 400 seaters in Folkestone or some place: it doesn’t make sense to me. Everyone has the reach and scope to i nd out themselves through analytics and their own social media and fanbase: “where am I wanted? Right, I’ll go there”. If Edinburgh taught me anything, it’s, “play to the right crowd, ’cos the show will suck otherwise”.’ Onstage, Burns is a thoughtful and intelligent performer, keen to puncture prejudice and i ght social injustice, but he’s also built something of a reputation for being aggressive and confrontational. Does he think he’s mellowed with age? A long pause. ‘I think so. God, I hope so.’ He thinks about it longer still before roaring with laughter: ‘of course!’
Brendon Burns: Mansplainin’, Blackfriars, Glasgow, Sun 11 Mar.