If camp dominated comedy at the Edinburgh Fringe festival in years past, this year it was disability. What hasn't changed is the controversy, writes Brian Boyd.
We've seen someone miming a fire alarm with no batteries, a performer walk off the stage during his set and run to the train station to go home, a deaf act getting heckled in sign language, a moon that won't pay his dental fees, a show called Jerry Springer: The Opera, someone take his artificial leg off on stage, Nicholas Parsons, a bunch of naked Samoans, deep-fried malteesers and a naked man in a George Bush face singing Roxy Music songs. And we've seen some really mad stuff too.
Still the biggest and the best, this year's Edinburgh Fringe had a record 1,500 shows and the usual amount of protest, controversy and general headline-generating ability.
We begin with the high culture-low culture head-on collision that was Jerry Springer: The Opera. The festival is renowned for shows that offer a "twist" on a format - Shakespeare done in hip-hop, Waiting For Godot performed by dyslexic cross-dressers, Abigail's Party in Inuit, that sort of thing. They're all invariably rubbish, and the sort of stupid gimmick that gives the Fringe a bad name in the grown-up arts world. The Springer show was given an added frisson because the man himself was in town to give a talk at the Television Festival, but never made it to the show. The idea came about when its writer and composer, Richard Thomas, came home drunk one night, switched on The Jerry Springer Show but with the volume down. "I saw six people on stage screaming at each other while a chorus of disapproval rang out from the audience," he says. "It was stagey,violent, tragic and incomprehensible. In a word, it was opera."
What the show does is highlight the common ground between "high" art and "low" TV. It's like the TV show, with its cast of people, but set to a libretto - it's compelling and oddly moving as these pimp/whore/white supremacists play out their dramas as if in La Scala. You'll never look at the TV programme, or indeed opera, the same way again.
Disability was one of the predominant themes this year at Edinburgh (making a welcome change from camp - now officially dead) with a trio of performers all using their own particular circumstances to fashion some resonant comedy material.
Francesca Martinez, who has cerebral palsy; Steve Day, who is deaf, and Jaik Campbell, who has a very bad stutter, will all no doubt look forward to the day when they're not all lumped in together, as they are here. Martinez, who has to be helped on to the stage each night, was a real find. She talks about how, when she is drunk, she walks in a straight line. Going into the audience, she throws back the prejudice that she encounters on a daily basis, asking people about something that they're not able to do - in one case a man who couldn't ski. She asked him, "Were you born not being able to ski?" and "Are your parents not able to ski also?".
She also has a very funny routine about going out on a date, wanting to make an impression and being so excited that in the restaurant she orders spaghetti, which she knows she won't be able to cut up. Rushing into the ladies, she gets on her mobile, rings through to the chef, explains her dilemma and has him cut it up for her so it doesn't look that it's cut up.
Still only 24, Martinez uses her jerky movements and slurred speech to her advantage on stage. "I really wanted to be an actress," she says, "but I found that stand-up comedy is one profession where my disability is a plus. Comedy embraces anybody with a difference, be they fat, ugly, or otherwise. It sounds funny, but it does help in this profession to have something which makes you stand out in the beginning, but I have no intention of being a one-trick pony - as in, the comic with cerebral palsy".
Now all Martinez has to do is get over that other condition she was born with - being a woman - and she'll be flying.
Steve Day, a philosophy graduate, also talks about his deafness as a "unique selling point". "I use it unashamedly," he says. "Being deaf was always a ball and chain, but now I put it to use. I'm the deaf comic. Now it's useful."
Similarly, Jaik Campbell believes that audiences seeing him battle with his stutter is one of the funniest parts of his act. He points to how Rowan Atkinson and Daniel Kitson didn't let their stutters interfere with their work. "Comedy actually improved their stutters," he says, "and I think the reason is that the condition prepares you well for this career.We are experts at handling embarrassment, humiliation and rejection. So we're well prepared to stand up in front of a group of people."
Another "disabled" performer, Adam Hills (born without a right foot), takes a different approach. "When I first started out, I was told not to talk about it because then I'd become known as the one-legged comic, and that was the best advice I ever got. It's only now - and I've done five different shows here in Edinburgh, and been nominated for a Perrier - that I've decided to talk about it.
"The show is called Happy Feet and I do go into it in some detail. I just found it really strange over the last few months going through metal detectors and setting the bleep off because I've a foot made of titanium. When people realise it's my false foot, they really back off and are almost embarrassed by it. It's like, 'don't offend the spastic'".
A superb show which saw Hills nominated again for a Perrier, Happy Feet will be coming to Ireland in September.
When the shortlist for this year's Perrier award was announced last Wednesday, there was a kerfuffle about it being another all-white, all-male affair. The six nominees (Dubliner Dara O Briain just missing out on a nomination by one place) were Adam Hills, Daniel Kitson, Omid Djalili (who's actually Iranian), Phil Nicholls, Noel Fielding and Jimmy Carr (one of the stars of this year's Cat Laughs). The group merely represent the fact that comedy at the Fringe this year, and every other year, is a predominantly white and male affair.
The best among them, for many, was Noel Fielding, on a solo outing this year from his usual Mighty Boosh pairing with Julian Barrett. Called Voodoo Hedgehog - for a reason that only becomes apparent in the final minute - the show features Fielding's preoccupation with bull frogs, angel fish and macaws. He appears as a half-man/half-ram called Seroovial Brookswho, who plays light refracting games with his zebra stepfather. Yes, those old chestnuts. There's a fabulous cameo appearance by the moon (yes, the moon) who informs us that he's "not paying any dental fees, because I am, after all, the moon", and also, that he prefers Ross Noble.
Fielding then changes into a wolf who rapes people's shadows. He brings along a raven on a stick to play with and sings "Are we to be married on the morrow".
A fabulous cartoon, narrated by the moon, is the real highlight here. This is all impossibly brilliant stuff, unique creative excellence from one of the best comics you could ever hope to see. And he's not even the funniest member of the Mighty Boosh.
It became quite clear early on that this year's Perrier award would be a battle between Fielding and Daniel Kitson, and there couldn't have been more of a contrast between the two young performers.
Kitson, having jam jar glasses, a bad stutter and having "fallen from the ugly tree and hit all the branches on the way down," talked poignantly about how he would be laughed at on the street for the way he looked and how he had failed to develop any social skills. Warming to this theme of "difference" and "the other", he eloquently laid bare society's prejudices, highlighting the ridiculousness of people being judged by their physical appearance. The truth, they say, is the funniest joke of all.
Kitson was a deserving winner of this year's Perrier. His is an important, intelligent and hysterically hilarious show.
There were renewed calls this year for a complete boycott of the Perrier award, with even an alternative awards ceremony set in place. Perrier's parent company, Nestle, has long been criticised for marketing breast milk substitutes in impoverished African states. Baby Milk Action, the campaigning organisation who set up this year's alternative award - Tap Water Award - argue that these substitutes lead to malnutrition and infection. "There is now an alternative platform to show that careers in comedy don't have to come at the expense of selling your soul," says Suzy Merrall, one of the organisers of the Tap Water Award.
The very first Perrier winner, Emma Thompson, put her weight behind the Tap Water Award, saying "the Perrier should be boycotted by all right-thinking people". The calls for a boycott were studiously ignored by almost every performer on the Fringe, a sure sign that the early agit-prop "alternative cabaret" days have gone the same way as the mother-in-law joke, and that the mainstream is now the new "alternative".
"It's fine for Emma Thompson, she's already won a Perrier," said one comic who didn't want to be named. "There are ways of putting pressure on Nestle other than attacking what is basically just a comedy competition at the Edinburgh Fringe."
As it turned out, the Tap Water Award, which was presented the same night as the Perrier prize, didn't generate the hoped for media interest. Irish-American comic Des Bishop won the award, but he seemed rather bemused by his selection. "Nobody seems to know how it was judged or who judged it," he says, "I just got a phone call from the Tap Water people asking me to come down on the night and accept the award. Without wanting to downplay it, it wasn't really a big deal. I think there was disappointment all around that barely any comics boycotted the Perrier."
An excellent Edinburgh then, even if Perrier left a bad taste in the mouth.
