SCOTTISH comedian Chris Forbes is bringing Christmas to the Edinburgh Fringe this August with a deeply personal new show exploring family, loss and finding humour in tragedy.
The Scot Squad star has returned to the festival with Father Christmas, a festive-themed show which sees him don a Christmas jumper in the middle of August as he reflects on the magic of the festive period.
The idea emerged after Forbes and his wife welcomed their second daughter shortly before Christmas last year.
Speaking to The National, he said: "It was a very beautiful and lovely thing. There were some complications and difficulties around the birth and the juxtaposition of that happening at the happiest time of year was very stark.
"It just reminded me how much Christmas is about family and tradition.
"It's the perfect microcosm really of every sort of emotion.
"There's fallouts, there's joy, there's grief, there's loss, there's happiness. Every human emotion happens in that condensed kind of one-week period of Christmas time."
His daughter's arrival sent Forbes on what he described as a "nostalgia trip", looking back at significant Christmases throughout his own family's history.
Becoming a father has also transformed his relationship with the festive season itself.
"Kids are what make Christmas magical," he said.
"The older you get, not just with Christmas, it's easy to become a bit jaded, a bit of a non-believer in a general sense.
"Life can be hard.
"So to see the magic come back in your kids' eyes and faces is lovely."
Despite its festive packaging, Father Christmas does not shy away from some of the more painful events in Forbes's life.
The comedian said finding humour in difficult experiences had been important for both himself and his family.
"Regardless of the difficult topic, whatever I talk about, it's almost imperative to find a way to laugh because you need to find a bit of light in the darkness," he said.
"If anything, you need it more than ever, humour, when something is as potentially devastating as some of the things that I talk about.
Forbes said describing humour as "therapeutic" could sound clichéd, but argued that being able to laugh during difficult periods was often simply necessary.
"Even if you didn't work in the arts and had no way of processing it through the medium of stage or song or art, humour is often the only bit of light that you can add to a serious situation to get yourself through it," he said.
Father Christmas also marks a return to stand-up for a performer many Scots will recognise as PC Charlie MacIntosh from BBC comedy Scot Squad.
"I feel like I get spotted more now than when it was on," he said.
"I think for the first three or four seasons at least it was a very cultish show. Not everyone was watching it.
"More people tuned in towards the last few seasons, so it's really been more the clips going out on social media."
Forbes has also found major success through his sketches as "Duncan Murray", the fictional lesser-known son of Judy Murray.
What was initially intended as a single online sketch unexpectedly developed into a series of videos and eventually a live tour after Murray embraced the joke.
His sketches alongside Murray have amassed over 20 million views online.
Forbes said: "It was very much intended to be a one-off sketch that I'd written and had hoped that we could convince Judy to even just walk in in the background of the last shot, maybe roll her eyes."
Instead, Murray was happy to take a considerably larger role.
"I said, 'Would you be up for saying this, that and the other?' and just wrote her a ton of lines that she delivered perfectly.
"Her comedic timing is a lot better than many of my peers, fair to say.
"She's immensely funny."
The popularity of those sketches also convinced Forbes of how dramatically social media has changed the comedy industry.
Having worked in comedy for around two decades, he admitted he was initially slower than some younger performers to embrace short-form online content.
However, he said it had allowed comedians to bypass the traditional gatekeepers of the industry and build audiences themselves.
"People are finding their own audiences, building up their own fanbase," he said.
"That's incredible that people aren't held back by the gatekeepers.
"I've been doing comedy for 20 years, but someone that's been having viral videos for the last year will be able to sell out a run of shows a lot better than I can just because I've been in the trenches.
"It's a learning curve still for some of us that started before that."
He said there was a growing appetite for Scottish voices around the world, pointing to the reception Scotland received in Boston during the World Cup as an example of international affection for the country's culture.
"It feels like we do have our own sense of humour," Forbes said.
"Sometimes our comedy shows maybe don't travel as far and wide as others because there's things that only resonate with Scottish humour.
"But then, on the other hand, you only have to look at how well received Scottish people were in Boston at the World Cup.
"There's such a love for Scottish culture and people that people want to understand that. They want to get in on this Scottish style and culture and comedy."
He pointed to comedians including Daniel Sloss, Connor Burns and Susie McCabe as evidence that Scottish performers can now develop significant audiences well beyond Scotland.
"People really like to hear the Scottish voice – as long as they can understand it," he joked.
Forbes is now hoping Father Christmas can tap into that distinctive Scottish humour and believes that, despite the absurdity of performing a festive show in August, the Fringe is perhaps the one place where it makes sense.
"I'm doing a Christmas-themed show and it's not even in the top 100 weird things that are happening at this festival," he said.
"It's just a magnificent time. It's a real celebration of life through all these many different art forms.
"It's the weird and wonderfulness of it. I love that there's just something for literally everybody."
Chris Forbes is performing Father Christmas at Monkey Barrel - MB2 until August 30 (not 17 or 24). Tickets are available here.
