Hot shame, dry heaving and dream audiences: a standup’s return to Edinburgh fringe | Edinburgh festival 2021
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I normally find Edinburgh fringe an extremely trying time. Now it’s an extremely trying time with fewer people.
Before setting off this year, several people in my life told me to “have fun at the fringe” which is so absurd I burst out laughing before crying that my show is still only 15 minutes long and I’m expected to speak for an hour.
My show is both a work in progress to prepare for my tour in January and an exercise in getting me past the stage fright I had after restrictions lifted. Performing over and over again inoculates you against the natural embarrassment you’re supposed to feel when public speaking, and I lost that in lockdown. After I went back to work I had the strong feeling that most normal people have, which is that public speaking is deeply wrong.
Even in non-Covid times, the first stage of a work in progress is 90% feeling deep self-loathing and 10% joy at finding a usable bit. You then go through a refining process of rewriting and doing the show over and over, rewriting and expanding the thing into an hour-long format, then squishing it into something resembling jokes.
I’ve talked a lot of people out of coming to the show and directed them to my later tour dates but the show sells out anyway. I tried writing it on the train up but stared out the window and hyperventilated instead. When I got to the venue, the staff were really excited as they’d released more tickets as a result of restrictions being lifted. I’m devastated that more people will witness this car crash. The venue manager was the happiest I’ve ever seen him. I smiled, trying to mirror his enthusiasm then excused myself to dry heave in the toilets.
I’m wearing a mask to walk to and from the stage and the audience and staff are masked up too. Even though it’s no longer a legal requirement, this is the venue’s policy to keep everyone safe. Lots of us catch mutant strains of fringe flu every year from performing in damp basements all month so I don’t mind these measures one bit.
This year I’m staying in Glasgow as I didn’t fancy paying 800 quid for 10 days in a studio. After bad gigs I like to flee the venue through the fire escape and into the night. This feeling is enhanced when you can run not only out of the venue but out of the city to cleanse yourself of the hot shame. This happens on night three. By night four my audiences are a dream. They say a good audience helps you write and a bad audience helps you edit and the ratio of good:bad audiences is just about right. As each day passes, the process of the show getting incrementally better minute-by-minute is incredibly satisfying. I remember why I’ve been coming to this hellscape for a decade.
I should give an objective perspective on the fringe. The general feeling among my peers is that this year is a special one and we’ll miss many elements of it when things return to normal. The fringe is smaller and not monstrously oversubscribed. It has more of a curated feel like Machynlleth or Melbourne or Kilkenny festivals. After a year of writing nothing, almost everyone is doing a work-in-progress show so comics aren’t freaking out about awards or TV commissioners or critics. And the audiences are nicer than ever – after the past year, they’re just delighted to be listening to someone other than their partner.