Fleeting Pleasures

Improvised comedy is huge at the Fringe. There are almost 70 shows falling into the category this year, splitting off into ever-more varied sub-genres: improvised musical theatre, improvised hip hop theatre, improvised contemporary Jane Austen-based theatre... the list goes on.

“I think that improv is definitely the most exciting thing to happen to the British comedy scene in the last 10 years,” says Daniel Roberts from Racing Minds, a relatively new addition to the Fringe stable whose quirky, long-form narrative shows contain much of the pathos and dramatic structure that you would expect from a good play. “There’s just been this explosion of possibility that everybody’s cottoning on to.”

Audience enthusiasm is matched by critical praise – Roberts points out that based on the (albeit scientifically questionable) measure of aggregate star numbers Austentatious (the Jane Austen one) and Abandoman (the hip hop one) were up there with the best shows at last year’s Festival.

It seems curious, then, that however popular and highly praised these shows become, they cannot grab the Festival’s ultimate prize. The Edinburgh Comedy Awards have for some years excluded the form, a position questioned just after the close of last year’s Festival in a polite, articulate piece written for the comedy website Chortle, by Sam Pacelli of the hugely popular improvised comedy troupe The Noise Next Door.

“It seems to me really odd," Pacelli tells Fest, "and not in keeping with the spirit of the awards, to exclude a certain bracket of comedy.” He stresses that “I don’t necessarily think that an improv troupe would win it,” but feels they should at least be in with a shot.

Nica Burns has been director and producer of the awards since 1984, and is keen to talk about her time in the early 1980s promoting and touring with improv troupes that included leading lights of the form such as Paul Merton and Josie Lawrence. “Anyone who thinks it’s easy to take a few suggestions off the audience and make people laugh is an idiot,” she says, her love and appreciation of the form readily apparent. “You might get one or two chuckles, but to sustain that for 50 minutes takes a tremendous amount of skill.”

But, she says, a very simple practical problem remains. “We got into terrible difficulty during the judging process, which was that the judges going on different nights had seen quite substantially different shows,” she explains. “So someone was saying ‘wasn’t it great when X happened' and everyone else was saying ‘well no, that didn’t happen on our night.’”

None of the improv performers that Fest speaks to seems furious about Burns’ position. But equally, none sees any good reason why improv shouldn’t be considered. Citing the review aggregates again, Roberts points out that "clearly, those reviewers weren’t all there on the same day. So the best improv groups have learnt to be consistent.”

This slightly misses Burns’ point, which is not so much to do with consistent quality as it is with the practical problems thrown up by lack of consistent content. But here again all three improvisers counter that all live comedy is in fact different every night – standup especially. “When [Michael] McIntyre got his nomination, about 15-20 minutes was him just chatting to his audience,” Pacelli points out.

Burns says that even when legendarily chatty, ‘improvisational’ standups like Ross Noble and Jason Byrne have been nominated for the Award, they still “have quite a structure that they can fall back on when things go wrong,” a portion of written or pre-rehearsed material that is performed most nights and that is assessable on its own terms. 

Ruth Bratt is a founding member of The Showstoppers, whose improvised musical practically invented the form for the UK and has been a Fringe favourite now for almost a decade. She concedes that improv is “a different kind of writing, because standups hone and they hone,” whereas for her troupe, “it’s always a first draft, it’s always a first night.”

Is there therefore a question mark over whether a show can possibly be as well-written as a tightly honed hour of scripted comedy? Pacelli thinks not: “We hope that pretty much everything we do would be funny if it was sketch, regardless of the fact that it’s improvised.” But given how many of the laughs in improv come from the stumbles, slips and close shaves that arise from the fact that the actors are thinking on their feet, it’s not an issue that’s easy to untangle.

Daniel Roberts contends that improv has become better at going beyond this kind of laughter in recent years. “I think that it’s an old-fashioned idea to exclude [improv comedy],” he says. Short-form ‘game’-type shows of the sort played by the Whose Line… team, back this year, are “hilarious stuff, but it’s not what you’d give an award to for artistic vision, I suppose. But now, if you want something beautiful, or subtle, or something that feels like it taps into what it means to be human…” he breaks off into eulogies about Cariad and Paul’s A Two-Player Adventure, a long-form improvised comedy that he describes as “the most beautiful show that I saw on the Fringe last year.”

Bratt agrees vigorously that improv can make people feel as well as giggle, and says that this is The Showstoppers' main objective for certain shows. “Sometimes the audience want something serious,” she says. “We’ve done things set in the First World War, which was not a funny show, because there’s nothing really that funny about it. I mean there is, but God you’ve got to be careful!” she laughs. The Showstoppers' whole approach she says, is not to “go for the gag” but to “play the truth of what you’re doing,” and “of course there’s an emotional response to that, because you’re always showing your vulnerability at some level.”

Whether or not the emotional and thematic resonance of an improvised show can stand alongside that of a more thoroughly crafted one will remain a moot point for as long as the awards exclude them. But if improv comedy is ultimately too transient to give an award to, that to some is its strength and not its weakness. “For me that is the joy of impro,” says Bratt, “that this is the ultimate ephemera. You’re making something for that night only, for that audience only.” And as long as audiences keep coming, that for some is reward enough.