First Fringe Sunday

First Sunday at the flat off Spey Terrace and the world couldn’t feel more distant. Riots in Tottenham and America’s credit rating circling the drain seem a world away from Edinburgh and the students making £6 an hour to push fliers for my show into strange people’s rain-soaked hands. The really great thing about doing shows for The Stand is it’s on the other side of town: a side of Edinburgh that feels like those walking past you might still be involved in a life outside of this thing called a festival.

Nonetheless, I sometimes feel like Bill Murray’s character from Tootsie, who drunkenly spouts off to a small group of actors that when the play he’s writing about the nuclear disaster at Three Mile Island opens he hopes it’ll be raining - that way he’ll get people who want to be there, as opposed to those who feel they’re following some of artistic trend. What a load of crap, but I love it.

Last night, after my show to a small but attentive crowd, I wandered over to do a set for a late-night crowd at the Pleasance Dome. At present, the real estate there resembles a circus sideshow, where those plying their trade for the Assembly, Gilded Balloon and the Underbelly are all gathered doing their best to out-poster, out-flier and out-shame each other. The net result of this feeding frenzy is that potential audience members are fought over like handfuls of flour in Somalia.

My first impressions, upon seeing the massive posters and such plastered about, were not unlike those walking into a porn shop for the first time. It’s a visual information overload which means that you can’t really focus on anything in particular - only this time, instead of seeing tits and ass everywhere, it’s the faces of comics (many of whom have just rounded the corner of puberty), or student improv groups falsely thinking that what they’re doing has yet to be done, or comic friends of mine who look out at me from their staged photo session with a sly smile doing their level best to impress some stranger they normally wouldn’t help to change a tyre.

Looking around, did I envy it? Of course. Did I wish I was a part of it? Not really. I’d rather be one tit on the wall on the far side of town than among many tits on this side.