As the Edinburgh Fringe gets under way, Kevin Gildeagives a comic's perspective on the best comedy he's seen there over the past decade
Phil Kay
I have seen Phil perform many times in Edinburgh. In the early 1990s I was in a group called Mr Trellis (with Barry Murphy and Ardal O'Hanlon) and we did a whole Edinburgh run on a double bill with Phil Kay. We were sore from laughter for the first 10 nights and still laughing at the end of the run (27 nights later). The improvisational nature of Phil's act makes this possible and I can think of no other comic who could have that effect.
Most comedians go on stage with a certain armour (an exaggerated version of the social armour we all carry in everyday life - one that provides protection in front of hundreds of strangers). What I love about Phil is that he takes to the stage without this, seeking to reclaim a childlike state where the whole thing is a game intending to have fun. His determination to play in front of adult audiences this way is a measure of his bravery.
The last show I saw summed up all that Phil is about. He stormed from the beginning: his show included a brilliant piece about how many stars his show was worth (reviewed shows in Edinburgh are assigned stars - one to five). He had photocopies of stars on stage and when a bit of his show did not go as well as others he would rip off a star to indicate that it had become only a four-star show. Then, when the show was firing again, he picked it up and proclaimed his show, once more, a five-star one: it was a really funny commentary on the competitive nature of the Edinburgh Festival and the absurdity of "marking" comedy.
The format of the show seemed to be Phil talking about what had happened to him the previous night and day. He had been on a big anti-war march and talked about the impossibility of protesting against war within an architecture that stood as a memorial to war: the statues, the government buildings, the institutions. It was a brilliant observation about the world we inhabit and he delivered the point with hilarity.
Then some guys he had got in on his guest list - a bit the worse for wear - started chatting to him and heckling and disrupting the performance. At one stage he told them to stop because he felt that "tonight" he was really going to be able to say some good stuff.
About 40 to 45 minutes into the set, he asked the audience what time it was. When told, he said "Oh no - I've got to relieve the babysitter" and he left. The lights went up and the audience couldn't believe what had happened. I exited the venue amid much disgruntlement and complaint. I met Phil the next night and I said it was a pity he didn't get to access all that he wanted to say because of the disruptive influence of his drunken guests. He said that it didn't matter - it was what it was. It is this perspective that makes him such a treasure.
He always seeks to give his best to an audience but his "work" does not lend itself to consistency. He is a national treasure (for a world of no nations). He should be celebrated - just don't build a statue.
Tommy Tiernan
I saw Tommy Tiernan play in a large marquee a couple of years ago. It was like a circus tent and he did the gig in the round. I'd never seen a comedian play in the round before and it looked quite tiring. Usually you just stand in front of an audience and employ a lighthouse scan of the head. Here Tommy was facing, turning, refacing and circling - he did a lot of circling, as though he was chasing ideas down and nailing them there and then.
What makes Tommy great is that there is no sense of repetition. It's this feeling that you're at the birth of what he's trying to say that makes him such a compelling performer. He actually performs his search for what he is trying to say on stage - this gives his performance an immediacy. He also communicates a sense of how important it is for him to communicate his ideas to the audience and for this they feel appreciated.
Tommy is an out-there performer in the sense that he goes out in the dark and reports back. He is a pioneer in the way he talks about things; it is the way we talk about things in our heads and this sense of liberation, of hearing the voice in our own heads spoken outside our heads, is one of the main reasons Tommy is loved.
Tommy fills the role of sacred fool - he has the licence to tell the untellable. In comedy there is a lot of second-hand subject matter: as in life, comedians follow paths well trodden. Tommy goes off the beaten path to find new ways of saying. There is originality and bravery in what he talks about.
In this gig he did a particularly funny thing about Israel and its attitude to the UN and the world: he characterised its position as a rant - a five-minute torrent of "F**k off"s repeated with ever-increasing energy and vitriol - a rant poem of expletives. It was cathartic - a political analysis that blasted through political analysis - a roar of frustration.
A taxi driver once told me that he didn't like Tommy because he uses "foul language". If you can't see beyond the language to what he is saying, it just proves the need for him. He is the mad fool who shouts at us about how foolish we are.
Eddie Izzard
In 1992, we performed our first full Mr Trellis show at the Edinburgh Festival. We played a venue called the Greyfriars Kirkhouse which, that particular year, was run by none other than Eddie Izzard. We were playing in the graveyard slot of midnight. Earlier in the evening, Eddie played the same room and I remember sitting in a buzz of anticipation.
I remember thinking: "I want to see how he begins the show" - back then I was big into beginnings. So Eddie came out in his usual flouncy, floppy, informal way - all soft edges. It's hard not to love a performer who is so like jelly onstage. The best physical example of this is when he mimes a cat drilling behind his sofa; mime seems to be based on very sharp, definite movements to delineate environment, whereas Eddie's drilling cat was a brilliant, bouncy, blurry act of mime, yet sharp in the mind's eye.
In that particular show he did his famous "brought up by wolves" routine. It is one of the funniest things I have ever heard - how he was raised by an anthropomorphic pack. At the time it was a celebrated piece but he made a point of saying, early on, that he was going to drop it.
He did. Most comedians will do a great piece to death but it is a mark of Eddie's desire to challenge himself - to constantly leave the comfort zone - that he stopped doing it. It is this determination that brought him to France to perform stand-up in his basic French and later allowed him to break America. I feel privileged to have actually seen the wolves routine. I feel privileged to have seen him in such a small room.
It is a mark of Eddie's true originality that he has been one of the most mimicked comedians in Britain. He is a one-off with a style all his own.
And what was the beginning? I think it was about bees and their meandering ways (apt given Eddie's style) and how bouncer bees would operate. I can't be sure because his beginning was so beautifully soft-edged that it bled into what went before and each subsequent piece was so brilliant that there was no time to remember what had gone before. It is to Eddie's great credit that he is about what's next.
Chris Lynam
In the early 1990s I saw Chris Lynam play the Gilded Balloon. Chris had been one of those performers who started as a street performer and moved indoors.
His big end piece was sticking a firework up his arse and lighting it. This is what passed for excitement in the early 1990s. He did this in the show I saw - and given its origins as a street piece there was much build-up to this anal spark fest. The nature of much street theatre is the emphasis on one particular piece of business - or stunt - and an over-emphasis on the build-up to it. They start with an ending and work their way back - padding a narrative towards the main event. Sparks flying out of a man's bottom, in this case. In fact this is one of only two things that I remember about this show - the other is the reason I chose it.
At one point in the show, Chris produced a package and told the audience that it was a bomb and proceeded to pretend to throw it a number of times. Now, because of an unpredictable punk element to Chris and his show, there was a genuine tension in the room - granted, it was a tension of seconds and though I, as a member of the audience, did not really think it was a bomb (or did I?) there was a real moment of worry (what were we thinking?). For me there is a measure of something exciting in a performer when they can engender such a feeling, creating a moment of frisson that punctures the usual audience-performer contract and threatens to remove the safety net of what we expect.
Eventually he did throw it, and it did explode - into a cloud of sparkling glitter. Then the lighting went red and Chris produced a clarinet and proceeded to play La Vie En Rose. It was a magical moment, a beautiful poetic scene launched from comedy, and there we sat, smiling and laughing at the beauty of it all. And it all coming from the set-up of the unexpectedness that is a comedy moment.
Doug Stanhope
I saw Doug play in a venue called the Tron. It was a small airless basement room with a backdrop of a black sheet like some nihilistic flag. The room was packed and there was the feeling that we could have been in a bunker in Sarejevo in the middle of that war. The setting was so apt for a figure who genuinely excavates the dark side of existence. He ambled on stage, physically frayed, mentally sharp. Many times I have seen the tagline "the new Bill Hicks", but this was the first time I saw a live comic who deserved the title unreservedly (there were many comics there - testament that something was happening).
It's not that he was the same as Hicks (the prerequisite for any "new" Bill Hicks is that they be an original and therefore different from Hicks) but he exuded the same authenticity, the same willingness to cut to the truth of things, the same need to tell it like it is and intelligence to relate the findings in a meaningful and often hilarious way.
He divided the audience - I could see some who were disgusted. His show was raw and on the edge (the show was called Something To Take The Edge Off) and there was the feeling, as he shambled about in his long grey overcoat, that if he were not standing in front of an audience unloading his thoughts that he would be getting loaded on some street corner, shouting at passers-by from the gutter.
This guy needed to be doing comedy in this room. He needed to be telling the truth - and people were responding to this air of necessity. They were witnessing something special - a feeling that there was a genuine "voice" talking. There was no show business: this was somebody laying himself bare - not in an indulgent "I'm-a-celebrity-hear-me-out-here" but as a starting point for a fiercely intelligent commentary on society.
I left the gig invigorated by the possibilities of stand-up and feeling not a little flimsy in my own efforts.
Daniel Kitson
Daniel stands on stage in the Stand Comedy Club. He is doing his own show and it is after midnight - usually the disruptive hour. But his audience listen attentively. He has made a point of finding them: they are fans - and, more, people of the same mind as Daniel. He could have been "bigger" than he is in a commercially successful sense, but he is an indie kid at heart.
He stands - long wild hair, thick NHS spectacles - a cross between Grizzly Adams and the boy always picked on at school in the 1970s. He removes the sense that you are at a performance and, consequently, the sense that he is performing. This is because he is one of the most natural comedians in the world.
Daniel seems to be able to talk about anything he wants and make it funny. Most comedians fit their humour, thoughts, opinions and observations into jokes or riffs or set-pieces, whereas he seems engaged in a formless monologue. It is not formless in one sense, as there is a strong narrative drive and it is very funny, but it seems formless in that he does not appear to be performing a set - he is just telling a story.
It's the way he tells them: nothing feels like a story or a joke - they all spin from him organically, unfolding with ease. He creates the intimacy of one friend telling another a story but within the context of a whole room of people. There is never a sense of a dip when he is doing stand-up, because he is elemental: it's like watching a landscape.
He is the boy who was bullied standing up against the bullies. He has a stutter which sticks through every now and again - how perfectly so many words now flow from his mouth. He is a poet against power and a foul-mouthed funny f**ker at that. He could make them all laugh if he wanted to but he doesn't - maybe that's his revenge.
The Edinburgh Fringe Festival begins on Fri and runs until Aug 27. See www.edfringe.com. Kevin Gildea performs at the Bud Light Revue this weekend in the Iveagh Gardens, Dublin