Walking down the Cowgate in Edinburgh when the festival is on, you run the gauntlet of dozens of standup comedians, each one offering a leaflet and beckoning you into their show. All of them are losing money to be there. And they are all bouncing with excitement and optimism.
The Cowgate is pedestrianised during the festival, and it’s crammed full of fringe venues – rooms above pubs, community halls, rooms with all sorts of different uses throughout the year, but for most of August they house most of Britain’s standup comics. If you were looking for a standup comic in any other city in August, I doubt you’d find one. They’re all here.
There are the big ones and the not so big. The established standups fill medium-sized venues each night, like the magnificent Matt Forde, whose impression of Keir Starmer is devastatingly accurate and very funny, and the wonderful Emmanuel Sonubi.
Coincidentally, Forde and Sonubi have both been seriously ill recently, and they use it in their act. Sonubi has us laughing at the fact that he nearly died. And we fell about when Forde announced that his operation left him with erectile dysfunction. That’s professionalism for you.
When it comes to the less well known, you can go to as many shows as you can stand, some funny and some not very funny at all; or you can do a little research first. My son Peter and I asked around at the Three Sisters, the vast pub on the Cowgate, with a few small rooms off the main bar, each one colonised by a standup comic. We went to one of the evening shows where four or five standups give a taster of their routine, so you can choose which to go to.
We enjoyed Paul Merryck, an east Londoner of almost 60 whose persona for comedy purposes is “Essex Man”, given credibility by a substantial beer belly on which, if he ever becomes rich and famous, he should probably take out insurance. “I said to my doctor, look, love – I’m given to casual sexism, as befits a man of my demographic.” He claims to have three sons all called Gary.
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His solo afternoon show, he told us, was in the horse box. Unable to find a venue with this promising name, we asked in the Three Sisters, and a helpful barman pointed across the road. To a horse box. A real horse box, with the attachment on the front that must have enabled a car to tow it there. It had hay on the floor.
Six seats had been crammed inside, and we sat in two of them while Merryck stood outside and tried to rustle up folk to fill the other four. He failed. His audience that afternoon was the two of us. Undaunted, he took the microphone, got into character, and launched into his routine.
It sounds embarrassing, but it wasn’t. Merryck’s pace and enthusiasm and sheer love of doing it carried all three of us happily enough through the next hour. They don’t charge for entrance for these shows; they hold out a hat afterwards. Is there anyone with so dead a soul that they could leave without putting folding money in it?
Afterwards he accepted a pint and told us how it was. The price of accommodation in the city rockets during the festival, and “that’s what’s killing the fringe. Everyone at my level loses money at Edinburgh.”
The rest of the year he does a bit better, in London venues like Angel Comedy and the Hampstead Comedy Club, as well as outside London. But it can’t be enough to keep his wife and children, I ask? He takes a long pull of his pint and mutters something about working in IT.
A room scarcely bigger than Merryck’s horse box served as the afternoon venue for Jay Sodagar, whose very funny act makes the most of his passing resemblance to London mayor Sadiq Khan. “A fat racist and a thin racist jump off a cliff. Who wins? We all do,” he calls cheerfully to the four of us he’d managed to dredge up that afternoon.
There’s something gloriously eccentric about it. They come to Edinburgh every year, they put their heart and soul into it. They go home happy. So do we.
Francis Beckett is an English author, journalist, biographer, and contemporary historian
