Comedy – to paraphrase and amalgamate definitions from seveal reputable reference works – is a genre of fiction that consists of discourses or works intended to be humorous or amusing, thereby inducing laughter.
As time progressed, the word came more and more to be associated with any sort of performance intended to cause laughter.
Through clowning and slapstick, past music hall characters and songs, after patter merchants, many happy decades of stand up and satire as a social weapon, it got ‘alternative’ and became politically left wing, it went surreal and really quite middle class, it accessorised itself with powerpoint and it rolled itself out into an all you can laugh at buffet of funny.
Then at some point, some generational shift in the genre, a craft which had gained so much from being self-deprecating and self-referencing, became self obsessed.
Of course the idea of the one hour Edinburgh show is a bully and the lure of the Big Comedy Award exerts a pull not always in a positive direction.
The percieved necessity for a PR-friendly USP is ever present but where and when and, in pity’s name, how did we get to the point where even a quick riffle through the comedy section of the Fringe brochure leaves you feeling irretrieveably dull and overwhelmed with guilt at your sad, muggle-like lack of diagnoses of anything from the now pretty much ubiquitous ADDHD (and her many acronymic sisters), through 360 degrees of neurodiversity to endometriosis, menopause and bowel cancer?
That, of course, is before we dip even a toe into the ever swirling waters of gender politics, where audiences can lose entire days to coming out stories from perfectly nice young people who are about one tenth as interesting as they imagine they are. Unless, of course, audience members have an ADDHD diagnosis, rendering them unable to concentrate for a whole hour of someone telling them about their non-binary revelations and how having their own flag has made everything ok.
Add to this the still smoking tail of the comet that was the original Dead Dad Show, bringing with it, this year, dead parents, lovers, marriages and other relationships, and, for all I know dogs. I work a lot in Kenya, and there are people, as there are in many third world countries, who wheel out their variously disabled family members, park them at the roadside and use their ‘otherness’ as a sales tool. I frequently get the same feeling, being urged to cut a couple of hours from my day (plus travel costs) to sit in the dark listening to someone who is filling in the blanks where the laughs should be with tales of the root canal work that ruined their life.
Try being a critic! Fringe shows from the self-identified suffering classes are terrifyingly dangerous to critique. One star too few and you are cast out into the hundreds of circles of socio-political hell wherein dwell the Phobes, of whose thought crimes we must not speak.
To be fair to the comics, the autobiographical hour predicated on your struggles with ingroing toenails and how they destroyed your dreams of being a ballet dancer (NB I exaggerate), is really very difficult to do. If you place it within the comedy section of the programme.
Because you have to be very good to make it work as comedy. It was fine (well, tbh, I didn’t think it was, really) for Hannah Gadsby to stand up for an hour of audience guilt-tripping and upset, but then she is Hannah Gadsby. And she is brilliant. And she was the first.
Francesca Martinez is a beautiful writer, a crafter of compelling comedic sophistocation and a wonderful trailblazer for the comedy performer who is, in her word, ‘wobbly’. Her early performances took CP to places it had never been. Like a comedy club. And, as it turned out, it was perfectly happy there.
Tim Renkow is a brilliant, vicious, foul-mouthed and fearless five-star comic who takes absolutely no prisoners with his material. And waaay wobblier than Francesca, a fact that fuels quite a lot, but not all, of his comedy.
Anyone who remembers the Abnormally Funny People will remember huge laughs and a cast of top quality comedians, speaking from life experiences none of us muggles in the audience had had.
Steve Day and Chris McCausland have serious comedy smarts with any material, but on the subject of deafness and blindness, they rock – obviously. The unexpectable Laurence Clarke, the dark comic brilliance of Liz Carr (yes that Liz Carr) and the unstoppable powerhouse of funny that is Tanyalee Davis all offer comedy plus. Plus whatever they choose to add. Plus, for example, hearing aids or wheelchairs or, in Tanyalee’s case, an extendable stick to reach her ‘coochie’.
The challenge for us out there in the dark nowadays, is that – and I could be wrong – the comedy seems to have become a poor second to the… ‘difference’. I always, rather naively thought that everyone is different, and some are simply more different than others.
Perhaps it is the fault of the PR industry, who, in a Fringe Brochure Comedy section overflowing with shows, insist on putting that ‘SP’ up front and centre. Before you learn anything in most press releases. You learn that this person is neurodiverse, dyslexic, non-binary, gluten intolerant, genderqueer … whatever. And, as a comedy critic, until and unless that person makes me (with their charm, their wit, their intelligence… their funny) I really, honestly don’t care.
So should you wish to turn your difference into an hour which you choose to classify as ‘comedy’, then please, please make sure that you are a good enough comic so to do. Just a thought. There is always Spoken Word.
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