The ObserverEdinburgh festival 2023What’s the funniest thing on the festival fringe? No, not politics, but painful introspection
Nominations for the prestigious Edinburgh comedy award, to be announced on Wednesday, are likely to include a few standup routines that sound about as funny as an electricity bill. Fringe performers who deal with parental cruelty, online sex-shaming, serious addiction, mental illness and a coercive cult could all be in the running.
Early tips suggest that among the contenders may be Ania Magliano, with a show about emotional recovery, André de Frietas, a Portuguese comic who describes his descent into prostitution, Moses Storm, who chronicles his childhood inside a cult, and fellow American Avital Ash, with an act that “workshops her suicide note”.
Each of these soul-baring performers has already been picked out as a potential star in an era of comic introspection and confessional humour.
“Right now, most younger comedians think it’s a lot easier and safer to look inwards rather than outwards,” wrote the established standup performer Ian Stone last week, commenting on the fringe festival at its halfway point for the fan website Chortle.
Standup has certainly taken a sharp turn towards inner trauma in recent years, giving rise to the dismissive portmanteau term “traumedy” to describe the comedic habit of processing disturbing experiences live on stage. And the 2023 Edinburgh fringe now looks like the peak of the trend.
American-Thai comedian Cam Gavinski has watched the growth of traumedy on the standup circuit on both sides of the Atlantic. “There is always a lot of overlap between laughter and shame anyway,” said the 26-year-old, who is impressing fringe audiences with an ingeniously theatrical approach to his own embarrassing online encounter with a blackmailer. “We seem to be at the height of the wave for this kind of show, and so already people are moving away from just a simple, straight telling of a personal story.”
Gavinski, whose Gilded Balloon show, Bonheur, uses both songs and a penis puppet to relate his experience, believes the framework of personal revelation can be a good first step to creating something surreal and playful.
Storm is similarly inventive at the Pleasance Courtyard where his well-reviewed show, Perfect Cult, nightly invites a crowd to invent and join their own bespoke religion as he describes the lasting impact of his early days inside the obscure cult his parents formed.
Old-school observational comedy, typified by the early routines of American veteran Jerry Seinfeld or by relatable British favourite Peter Kay, had been rumoured to be making a comeback. But the latest generation of comics, whether from Lancashire or Los Angeles, are concentrating instead on shows that focus on extreme private discomfort.
“In some ways, it is very natural to land on these traumatic subjects for a show,” said Gavinski, quoting the popular formula “comedy equals tragedy plus time”. “The reason I gravitated towards it for my own show, which is a true coming-of-age story, is because it was a way to approach things I wanted to say.”
And, Gavinski added, discussing his intimate history on stage does not feel as exposing as it sounds, since the script gives him a protective distance.
Not everyone is convinced by the shift towards comedy with therapeutic intent. For some older comics, the widespread use of personal pain threatens to become a creative dead-end that dodges the bigger issues. “I am just gobsmacked there aren’t more people up in Edinburgh doing shows about politics,” said Andy Parsons, a regular on BBC Two’s former satirical panel show Mock the Week, who is at the festival with his sellout show, Bafflingly Optimistic, ahead of a national tour.
“There are a few shows here that do cover it, but mostly from older comics like me. Given all the things that have been done to young people, with the housing crisis, the cost of living and climate change, you would think some would want to use the stage to talk about it.”
Stone, in his essay for Chortle, expresses the same surprise at finding that his show, Ian Stone Will Make It Better, was one of only a few to have fun with politics. “The big topics of the year seem to revolve around death, mental health issues, relationship break-ups, gender and sexuality,” he wrote.
“But overtly political shows seem to be about as rare as a filter on a sewage outflow … Where’s the comedy at the fringe that holds the powerful to account?”
It is not an entirely generational split, however, as well-known performers such as John Robins and Ed Byrne are both venturing into the territory of serious trauma. Robins’s show, Howl, addresses a recent mental illness and addiction crisis, and follows on from the themes of his award-winning 2017 show The Darkness of Robins and 2019’s Hot Shame, while Byrne has nailed his colours to the mast with the title of his show, Tragedy Plus Time, which discusses the death of his younger brother, and has been saluted by the Guardian as some of his best work yet
And, of course, mixing comedy with pain has a long history in entertainment. The revered Richard Pryor famously mined his tough background in his standup routines. “I remember Reginald D Hunter did a great show about his mother’s death, and even I did a show in 2005 called Genocide, Suicide and Cancer,” recalled Parsons.
The London comic also acknowledges that the idea for his new political show was inspired by a domestic challenge: he was stumped when he tried to explain to his children why there had been three prime ministers in 12 months.
This article was amended on 20 and 24 August 2023 to correct some misspellings of Cam Gavinski’s surname, and Ania Magliano’s first name. Also, Magliano’s show does not look at her hidden bisexuality, that was last year’s show, but instead is about emotional recovery. The caption under the picture of Avital Ash said her act “worships her suicide note”; as the article made clear, the performance “workshops” it.
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