From the fringe: Week 2

For the next four weeks, comedian Joseph Moore is performing in the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world’s largest arts festival, with FanFiction Comedy. Here’s the second installment of his weekly blog documenting his “experiences, creative highs, and no doubt psychological rock bottoms at this bloody draining festival”.

My Edinburgh Fringe got off to a dramatic start last week when I almost got hit by a bus. I worried that if I had been killed, I would have left behind a worthless legacy of middling efforts on the festival circuit as part of FanFiction Comedy.

Well, good news everyone! In the last 11 days, I’ve done 11 shows, three of which have been sold out. This is the same festival where a friend of mine recently did his show to an audience of five, one of whom was his dad, and another, some lady’s dog. Which he accidentally kicked in the first five minutes. And compared to some acts, he’s not doing that badly. 

I’ve spent most of my time here flyering – that is, standing on a sodden Edinburgh street with wet shoes and 25 pounds’ worth of photocopying, yelling inane taglines (“Pop culture comedy from New Zealand!”) at strangers in the hopes that that particular combination of words incites them to take a card with a picture of your face and a mildly complimentary review on it. They mostly don’t.

We’re competing with professionals – hot people paid by producers to hustle a variety of shows, often by peacocking with wigs or rollerblades. Other acts advertise their shows by performing bits of it on the street, like The Ukelele Evangelists, who wear wartime clothes and do grammatically-correct Destiny’s Child covers (“I didn’t really know that you could get down like that, tell me Charlie, how do your angels get down like that?”), and The Hoop Hooligans, a Kiwi duo with goatees who dance to dubstep with an orb and some hoops. My main gripe with them is that they didn’t just opt for ‘The Hoopligans’.

And then there’s us, standing awkwardly beside these guys, hoping that our very non-committal attitude is enough of a point of difference.

After doing a couple of shows to crowds who just weren’t into our geeky schtick (I’ll never forget watching a friend deliver five minutes of very specific Pokemon jokes to a tattooed Incredible Hulk-lookalike in a UFC T-shirt in the front row), our tactic has been to target people who look like they’d be into our show. That’s people who are wearing pop culture T-shirts or “glasses”, or have weird-coloured hair, or are under 25, or are bored-looking teenagers – just some broad and semi-offensive profiling. We are the TSA, and the persons of interest are wearing Doctor Who shirts. (Worth noting: Superman and Batman have entered the mainstream.)

“Just how many of you are there?” a guy wearing a Back To The Future T-shirt yelled at me when I offered him a flyer yesterday. Apparently I was the fifth person from our group to have approached him in the space of half an hour. He never came to the show. I reckon he would have liked it.

It’s strange to think that Edinburgh exists in any other state than Fringe Festival madness. Occasionally I get handed a flyer that asks me to vote for Scottish independence in the upcoming referendum, and I think, How many stars did the upcoming referendum get in The Scotsman? But when we leave at the end of August – along with hundreds of thousands of others, with their ukuleles and their orbs – Scotland will just keep on going, doing normal important shit like voting in referendums.

In some ways, I’m already looking forward to going home. I know Scotland isn’t famous for its food; there isn’t a ‘Scotland Week’ on Masterchef. But on the semi-suburban street I live on alone, there are five or six takeaway joints, all of which do Fish N Chips, Pizza, Curry and Kebabs, as if ‘foreign’ was one broad type of cuisine.

It’s not an ideal scenario for anyone, but I’m a vegan. I think it’s a good thing to do if you care about your health and the environment, but it’s proved challenging in the ‘gross-stuff-with-cheese-on-it’ capital in the world. Over the past month I’ve spent a lot of time ordering side dishes for my main, and wondering why ‘salad’ has to mean bacon and mayonnaise. But I’m not one to turn my nose up at local culture entirely, so in true Edinburgh Festival Fringe fashion, here are some short reviews of the vegan meals I have enjoyed.

• Beans on Chips

A can of no-brand baked beans tipped over a polystyrene container of yellow chips and microwaved for definitely not long enough. Great if you want to recreate the experience of being 18 and not knowing how to cook, and will pay £4 for the privilege. Two Stars

• Curry on Chips

Some curry sauce poured onto the same chips. Basically just a Aloo Curry, with deep-fried chips instead of potato, and your drunken tears instead of rice. Three Stars

• Curry

Found a vegetarian curry place that I thought would be my savior for the month. Then I found a maggot in my rice, which kind of ruined it. Half a Star (For the yummy maggot-free samosa)

My girlfriend has made a bet with me that I will break my veganism here. Yesterday I spent about half an hour in the supermarket, staring at a fridge full of cheese-heavy ready-made meals, thinking about how the only reason I hadn’t given in yet was not my commitment to do right by the planet but my determination not to lose. We’ll see how I go. But I don’t think the odds are in my favour.

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