From the fringe: Week 1

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 first installment of his weekly blog documenting his “experiences, creative highs, and no doubt psychological rock bottoms at this bloody draining festival”.

People often say the Edinburgh Fringe will be the thing that kills them – be it the stress, the chips-and-cheese-heavy diet, or the expectation to be constantly wasted on giant bottles of Fanta-flavoured cider. They’re joking, but today in Edinburgh, I almost died.

I confused a green man traffic light on the other side of the street for the one on mine, and stepped out in front of a double-decker bus, standing frozen to the spot as, horn blaring, it screeched to a dramatic halt about 30 centimetres from my stupid, bad-at-understanding-traffic-signals face.

The driver got out and yelled obscenities at me in front of a stunned crowd, accusing me of being blind (awkward for him if I was (I’m not)). I didn’t respond, mainly because I was in shock. But also because I realised that if he had braked a second slower, my final act on this earth would have been telling some Harry Potter jokes to a crowd of 17 people at an arts festival I spent thousands of dollars to be at, during which a middle-aged Scottish lady in the front row spent 40 minutes on her iPhone before straight-up falling asleep. Shit it’s good to be here!

I did the Edinburgh Fringe last year, so the bleak reality of being here is no surprise. I’m here with FanFiction Comedy, where a group of super-nerdy New Zealand comedians read stories aloud on stage. Back home it’s more of a side project, but overseas it’s gained far more traction than any of our other work. Turns out Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc. are far more popular here than the subject of my solo stand-up shows, “myself”.

We’re now four days into our run of 25 shows (we have one day off in the middle. We’re going to go to a castle) and have eased into a routine: wake up, staple paper to flyers, give flyers to strangers, get handed flyers by one of five theatre companies doing a gender-reversed Twelfth Night, do your show, accept applause, make your parents proud forever.

For us, though, the lead-up has been atypical, having been invited to attend a youth theatre festival running concurrently with the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, despite being neither ‘theatre’ nor especially ‘youth’. We were put up in a hostel that sold £2 Jagerbombs and spent the week workshopping very earnest and talented drama students’ heartfelt monologues and interpretive dances to Imogen Heap songs.

Even more bizarrely, my fellow FanFiction Comedy performers Heidi O’Loughlin, Eli Matthewson and I were asked to perform for New Zealand’s entire Commonwealth Games team at a function the night before the opening ceremony – an honour previously bestowed upon national treasure Dave Dobbyn.

Before the gig, we were given a tour of the athletes’ village, guarded by machine-gun-toting policeman, one of whom yelled at me to “get in the safe zone”. We got to see where the athletes have spas, and eat chicken salad; we sat in on a briefing about “social media etiquette”; we saw the New Zealand teams’ hang-out area, complete with jandal-print cushions and an old Wii.

Then we had to make a room full of sober elite athletes laugh. I was afraid it would be like standing up at school assembly to plug my lunchtime improv class, but as it turns out, after years of media training and representing their country, athletes make a super polite and attentive comedy audience. So are we the new Dave Dobbyns? What can I say, I think we DD Smashed it.

Now we’re back to the slog of Edinburgh. For all my skepticism, it’s pretty special to be one of a million extra people in the city for a month, simply because of the arts. And where taxi drivers talk to you about which shows are getting good buzz, like it was the latest All Blacks result. Four shows in, our audience numbers are slightly up on last year, but we’ve got 20 to go – and as I’m not currently being scraped off the road by Edinburgh CSI, guess I better get on with it.

This content is brought to you with funding assistance from New Zealand On Air.