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Published: August 8th 2011
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I always thought the Melbourne International Comedy Festival was on par with any in the world, but the
Edinburgh Fringe simply leaves Melbourne for dead. Over 2,500 shows, street artists everywhere, spectacular old buildings, huge outdoor temporary bars set up in squares, Edinburgh turned it on, and the locals are so cheery despite the appalling weather!
We arrived at
Edinburgh on a surprisingly mild Friday night and it was a quick and easy trip before we were on the
Royal Mile and amongst the thousands of revellers. The first thing we stumbled upon was a bagpipe player belting out some mainstream tunes you would never hear played on bagpipes, which was quite amusing. Scotland was anything but bleak and the locals were friendly and funny as we queued in a monster queue to see the midnight show,
Best of the Fest at the Assembly Hall. Being able to drink out of plastic cups on the street helped passed the queue time. The wait was certainly worth it as for 10 quid we got 90 minutes of comedy gold from the always excited and mischievous
Jason Byrne, the aloof
Jimeon and
Glen Wolf, who mused about why Al Queda don't go
after China instead of the West and why China really banned Google. It was all held together by the fantastic local MC
Andrew Maxwell, who would have been even funnier if I could understand his accent. Thankfully after the show we only had a short downhill walk to our hotel at 2am.
The next morning it was sunny so we walked around the very green Edinburgh Castle gardens but didn't fancy the 1 hour queue to get tickets to go in the castle so admired from the outside before getting a different view from
Camera Obscura, which is the nearby telescopic camera that gives 360 degree views of the city.
We walked down the Royal Mile and got asked by seemingly thousands of people to go see their show. Off the side of the Mile, street performers sing and play, some to little or no audience, a lot dress up and it is all a bit of fun. We went to the
Udderbelly area which is one of the main hubs of the festival and had lunch and a drink in the outdoor area. It then started to rain...and in typical Scottish style it didn't stop, so we
went to 4 shows that covered the rest of the day.
We ended up getting tickets to a comedy play in a small little room with only about 30 in the audience. The play was about a shambolic wedding band's drama and was quite well done.
We then headed to the
Sin Bar to watch Melbournian comic
Yianni do his free show to a large crowd. He put on a solid show despite some first show glitches along the way. Yianni isn't your typical stand up comedian, you can tell he is a business and law graduate by how logical and structured his material is, which I personally like. He had good slides too!
We then had dinner overlooking the castle at a nice restaurant called
The Outsider before heading to see
Dave Gorman, a brilliant British comedian who used powerpoint slides to perfection to deliver a perfect routine of incredible detailed observations. Some might argue that his comedy is too scripted and there is no audience interaction but I thought it was brilliant, perfectly delivered witty observations. His use of graphs explaining how his wife baking cakes all time meant he was punching further and further
above his weight were gold, as was his 10:08 demonstration of advertising clocks being the happy position on the clock and how HTC have continued to take that time on their digital phone ads even though their are no hands on a digital clock. He also dissected the fake twitter accounts on their advertisements.
Then we were off to the
Gilded Balloon to see Aussie musical comedy act,
The Axis of Awesome. We were made to queue outside in the rain, and we queued with several funny English guys who were wannabee comedians themselves and helped us pass the time. Once they got started the Axis of Awesome delivered some energetic material, some rather telegraphed and predictable humour but finished with a couple of gems which made the show seem like a worthwhile hour of entertainment! I remain unconvinced on musical comedy though.
Sunday morning greeted us with more rain and drearyness. And it didn't get any better, in fact it didn't stop raining for 30 consecutive hours before we left Scotland, and they call this summer!
We powered on through the rain and went to check out
Holyrood Palace and the Houses of Parliament. The Palace is a grand old building set on the backdrop of the surrounding hills, while the parliament building is a complete eyesaw that the Scots must have built only to annoy the queen as she has to look at it each time she looks out the Palace.
We went to an early show at the festival from some newbies called the
Mythbunkers. They had potential but needed some better material to get onto a real stage at a decent time. They were on in a musty dingy room that I was convinced is a disused basement the rest of the year.
We then headed over to the
Pleasance Courtyard area where we saw the
Tim Vine Chat Show. Tim Vine of course from The Sketch Show and he delivered his trademark one-liner barrage such as 'crime in a multi story car park - that's wrong on so many levels'. However Tim's show centered around getting audience members to come up on stage where he would interview them, of course using the interview questions to get responses that would lead him to a joke. I was the 4th interviewee picked by Tim and next thing I was up on stage under the bright lights with Tim firing questions at me. Sadly I didn't get much of a chance to get my humour accross. He would ask questions like 'do you eat meat?', where on saying yes, he would launch into 'the other day I went to the butcher and he had some meat hanging from the ceiling when I asked for it, he said to me, ill bet you 10 quid you can't reach that meat and I said sorry I won't bet, the stakes are too high'. But I did get one pretty good laugh when he asked me if I'd killed anyone and my response was 'no, except for this show'. Being part of the show added to it, but I really enjoy Tim Vine's style, quick jibes, self depreciating and very clean humour. It was a nice way to end a dreary Sunday afternoon in Edinburgh before heading back to London.
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