With his red rimmed eyes, his white-smeared face and his desperate demeanour Frankie Monroe made an unforgettable Fringe debut last year – and carried off an Edinburgh Comedy Award for his creator Joe Kent-Walters.
This year’s sequel comes live from Hell, where Frankie has become the Entertainments Officer – and is doing quite well, until he hears about a hostile takeover of his beloved Rotherham Club The Misty Moon.
‘Joe Kent-Walters is Frankie Monroe (DEAD!!!) Good Fun Time’ promises more surreal schlock horror from a world of old-fashioned entertainment which is gone, but not quite forgotten.
Kent-Walters says: “I lived down the road from a working man’s club in Huddersfield and I used to go drinking there when I was a teenager.
“There were all these old guys in there and they were almost like ghosts – part of a dying world. They have these jokes they have been doing for forty years.
“That’s where the character comes from.”
Frankie Monroe first emerged as the MC for a charity fete and then re-surfaced years late when Kent Walters started doing stand up.
“I think the thing that really feels good about Frankie is it doesn’t feel like a character to me – it’s more like a mask. When I’m Frankie I don’t feel like I’m acting – it feels like an extension of myself.”
Although Frankie is grotesque, he’s a people pleaser at heart. The freedom to shock his audience is one reason he’s consistently able to unlock the really big laughs.
“My favourite thing is when you are looking at the audience and you see the relationship between horror and comedy. You see people recoil and being really scared and unnerved and then you can release that fear and that tension with a laugh.
“It lets you win the audience over. At the beginning they are thinking: ‘Who is this freak?’ and at the end they are thinking ‘We love this freak’.
And some other strange characters at the Fringe…
There’s a host of oddities in Susan Harrison’s one woman variety show Should I Still Be Doing This?
Harrison has let her imagination run riot to create a Woman Who Has Swallowed a Small Girl in a Well and a Sindy Doll with Low Self Esteem, as well as giving voice to a Mancunian panda and an elderly Motorola phone from the noughties.
As a long-standing member of Showstopper! and Austentatious she says: “I have always done improv – so for me it feels quite natural to be going from one character to another.”
When not writing for the Daily Show US comic Lily Blumkin loves to explore the voices in her head.
“I did stand up. But there is something about talking about your own life which doesn’t feel as interesting and fun to me as making something up.”
In her show Nice Try, which is her Fringe debut, Blumkin inhabits a host of characters including a Bar Mitvah boy, a talking clump of hair and a man who is just a little too proud of his gay daughter.
What do they all have in common? “They take things to a ridiculous extreme.”
Joe Kent-Walters is Frankie Monroe: DEAD!!! Good Fun Time, 21:30, Monkey Barrel, until August 24
https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/joe-kent-walters-is-frankie-monroe-dead-good-fun-time
Susan Harrison, Should I Still Be Doing This, 17.40, until August 24
https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/susan-harrison-should-i-still-be-doing-this
Lily Blumkin, Nice Try, 17:40, Gilded Balloon @ Patter House, until August 25
https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/lily-blumkin-nice-try
