Comedy
Edinburgh where every local hates you...
Published 20 August 2007
Alyssa McDonald returns to her native Edinburgh to check out some of the comedic offerings at the festival
If you visit Edinburgh during this final week of the Festival, I'm sure you'll have a great time, but I can tell you for a fact - having grown up in the city - that every local hates you. Hates you.
Remember the scene in Trainspotting where an American tourist walks into the pub Renton and friends are drinking in, and asks to use the "bathroom"? The majority of Edinburgers aren't about to give you that kind of kicking, but their loathing runs just as deep.
Of course the Festival is vital to the city's economy, and to some extent this revulsion is just an expression of the warm and sunny disposition we Scots are so famous for.
But there are more concrete reasons too: not only has tourism pushed the price of a pint up to central London standards, it also turns the city into a single gigantic bottleneck for one month every year.
Which is fine if you're on holiday, ambling commitment-free in and out of shows, restaurants, bars and exhibitions, among the tens of thousands of cheerful tourists clogging the pavements and roads as effectively as a deep-fried haggis supper blocks the arteries.
It's a bit more irritating (think Michael Douglas in Falling Down) if you're trying to get to work. And it doesn't really matter how much cultural and artistic richness the Festival brings, because people who live in Edinburgh are too busy going to work and getting on with everyday life to enjoy the bulk of it.
As an Edinburgh native I understand this anguish, but after two-thirds of a decade in London I don't really feel it any more. And when this year's Festival reviews and write-ups started appearing, all those plays and films and art galleries began to look pretty tempting. Arriving in Edinburgh last week, I found myself glad for the first time to be at the Festival, but feeling like an outsider.
So it was oddly satisfying to be able to identify the locals at Dan Clarke's stand-up show. They were the stony faced ones sitting with their arms crossed before the comedian had even started: comedians have to chisel through an Edinburgh residents' outer layers of resentment to have any hope of hitting a funny bone. Sadly for Dan, and the rest of us, he wasn't quite on target.
In a show loosely themed around technology and his slightly shaky love life, he had a couple of good gags - one about the overuse of kisses in text messages, and another about the rush-hour tube ("I don't even get this close to people when I'm f***ing them"), but mostly he just seemed to be rambling aimlessly. He's probably a hilarious drinking buddy if you like blokey observational comedy, but as a routine it was too thin to get any of the locals even to crack a smile.
Fat Tongue's sketch show, on the other hand, devastated the composure of every person in the room, including, at one stage, the three comedians. The show is a mix of clever parody (three Big Brother contestants reveal insider information about Alexander Litvinenko's poisoning among other events - but only to each other, whilst the audience listens to birdsong interrupted by the occasional inanity), surreal set-ups (a zebra chatting up a penguin in the auditions for a David Attenborough programme) and deeply silly scenarios(an extraterrestrial version of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire delivered in the alien tongue), performed with - for the most part - slickly straight-faced wit.
As an evening's comedy goes, it wasn't a bad start to the Festivaal, but for me the formal entertainment was completely upstaged by a text message from my brother, who works at the film festival. "How's this for glamour?" - he'd just been standing at the urinal next to Ewen Bremner, best known as Spud in Trainspotting.
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