Fringe benefits

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe

I’ve been back from Edinburgh for three days now, and I still feel tired.

Towards the end, it started to feel like I must have had a stroke and everything that was happening was my dying hallucination.

Here are my Edinburgh highlights:

1. I did 10 improv shows where I played Dungeons and Dragons with children, pretending to be a dwarven wizard. At the end of one show, one of the children got me executed by the King (he held a grudge just because I sent him into danger while I hid behind a rock), and then the other child got that child executed for killing me. That’s some Reservoir Dogs shit.

   

2. I took over Toby Shure: Love Ireland, a very problematic show where an English comedian (ISH award nominated comedian for Best Newcomer Peter Bazely, who obviously should have been ISH award winning comedian for Best Newcomer but it’s all fucking rigged, isn’t it, it’s all about who you know and who’s turn it is, and to be honest Bobby Davro couldn’t even read the cards so how do we know he read out the right name) pretends to be Irish.

   

   I have very little idea what the show was originally supposed to be, but when I took it over it was just a compilation show where a bunch of acts do 5 minutes of standup. After a long conversation with Ed Mulvey on the walk home, we devised a format where a bunch of acts do 5 minutes of standup, but some of the acts do a fake accent and the audience has to vote on who’s faking. And that was pretty good. Highlights included: Kat Powell (a newer Scottish act) absolutely nailing an Irish accent, fooling even the Irish people in the audience; she brought her bag with her so I said “I grew up in Birmingham so an unattended backpack and an Irish accent makes me nervous”; Sahar Ali pulling off an English accent and amazing the audience when it turned out she was Irish (hope I spelled your name right Sahar, but it’s hard to get these crazy Irish names right); Londoner Bilal Rashid fooling the audience with an accent he described as ‘call centre’ (his words not mine). Shout out to all the other heroes/heroines who did their whole set in a a different accent.
   It’s the first time I’ve booked and MC’ed a show, as well as organising the anti-anti-Irish counterprotestors who were supposed to picket the show. I learned a lot. It was a good show 3 times out of 5 that I did it, and I hope we can carry on doing it in London.

3. I did Hate N Live again for the first time since 2022, and, while I was the worst on the line-up, I don’t think I was shit.

4. I was privileged to get this year’s exclusive white-background Prince Andrew Tate Appreciation Hour T-shirt. As a thank-you, in the last show of the run, I called Mark O’Keefe retarded in a 2 minute set that was almost certainly in breach of Scottish hate speech legislation.

5. On my last night in Edinburgh, I ended up at the lock-in afterparty for a show called ‘Ask a Stripper’. A man set his dick on fire. I’m pretty sure that’s what happened, but I was scared to get too close.

6. I accidentally befriended the children of two high-profile comedians on the train home. I don’t want to go into too much detail about this, because I think I also accidentally offended one of the comedians at the ISH awards party and it’s going to seem like I’m stalking him now. Anyway, their kids are charming and hilarious and now I get why they wanted four of them: they’re breeding an improv troupe. They were mostly boys, but they had long hair, so it was confusing.

Bonus content

My short story didn’t win the $500, but it did win a $20 runner-up prize, which is frankly a drop in the ocean compared to the massive cost of going to the Fringe.