Glenn Wool is just about the best thing to come out of Canada after maple syrup and Ryan Reynolds. This year he is taking up residence in The Beehive for his twenty fifth Edinburgh Fringe. TWENTY FIFTH!
Obviously, fans of great comedy are thrilled, but what is in it for Glenn?
“I suppose muscle memory has something to do with it. It’s just kinda what I do now. Like a pit pony descending into the darkness of the mine every day doesn’t know why any more. It just does it and looks forward to the beach trip (which is the only difference, it gets holidays).”
Glenn has, across this quarter century, been described as “effortlessly funny” “eye-wateringly funny”, “excruciatingly funny”, lethally funny”, “absolutely hilarious” and “vagabond, journeyman comic” (Chortle … really ?).
He tours with Stanhope and pods with Frankie Boyle, he shares an album cover graphic artist with Iron Maiden. He is, to seasoned Fringe-goers, a stone-cold legend. But warm as they come, in person.
Sadly, in recent years, so many of his attributes as generally acknowledged leader of Edinburgh’s Comedy as Rock ‘n’ Roll Pack have become almost drawbacks …
He is an enviably chilled, straight, cis, white male who is neuro-normal and not (yet) diagnosed with any decent, catchily-named psychiatric problems or Syndromes.
In a Fringe (and I have seen the programme) which is 70 per cent young people ‘bravely’ talking about their ‘darkest’ struggles, won’t he feel out of place?
“It does sound like they are on as many drugs as I was at their age. But they just got a doctor involved, whereas I was much more of an improviser. In reality, theirs is probably the wiser way. Deal with the flame of youth in a prescribed manner. I know as a new parent I’m all in for that kind of measured response from the kids.”
I am, tbh, somewhat devastated to hear that fatherhood has tamed some of the crazy out of the wildest and Wooliest of Edinburgh’s funny men.
“However … ”
Ooo, here we go …
“The rebellious side of me wishes they’d just get an eight ball and really dig out what’s been bugging them. A fair few would realize they probably don’t have these self-diagnosed problems and that they’re ashamed of their parents’ wealth so they have to add obstacles their existence to give themselves a perceived right to talk.”
You have to love this guy!
“Now, the coke way is probably not the best way but as Fentanyl creeps across the ocean it may just be the last summer you can do that without the risk of being found face first in your note book with half the sentence “it’s not so bad aft…”
Always the helpful adviser to the young. What a guy!
I do not remember comics being so grindingly self-obsessed where their comedy was concerned … not in what I tend to refer to as ‘the good old days’. So I ask the one who knows 25 years of Fringe comedy. and from the inside.
“Well let’s be fair, it is all just poorly hidden self-obsession. It has always been there. We were just never so overtly proud of it.”
He can say that again!
I discover that Glenn could have had the greatest ‘Dead Dad Show’, in the days when the ‘Dead Dad Shows’ were the way to go.
His Estonian father, escaped a concentration camp in Sweden after World War Two by helping steal a minesweeper and sailing it to Ireland, became a policeman in Toronto, investigated Jeffrey Archer for Fraud and ended up as a character in ‘Not A Penny More Not A Penny Less’.
But Wool just carried on making people laugh fit to destroy their pelvic floor. For 50 minutes flat.
Which used to be the way to go.
“Yeah,” says Glenn “I enjoy comedy much more when people don’t tell me who they are. they show me. In good comedy, that’s what you’re doing – watching a brain work – and if you’re doing it properly you shouldn’t need to tell people you think about things differently – it will be obvious.”
Could not have put it better.
This year’s 50 minutes of fun is entitled: The Tardigrades Picnic. Were I you, I would book now. Glenn is proper Fringe. And The Beehive doesn’t hold many people when they are rocking backwards and forwards with laughter.
Glenn Wool: The Tardigrades Picnic
20:15
Scottish Comedy Festival@ The Beehive Inn
August 4 – 28
