Is the fringe a Scottish festival? It doesn’t always feel like it. Comedy-wise, Scots are conspicuous by their scarcity at comedy’s top table – given, for example, Billy Connolly’s role as the granddaddy of UK standup, Glaswegians’ reputation for humour, and the fact that the world’s biggest comedy festival happens in their country’s capital. Correct me if I’m wrong (and the mainly Canadian / slightly Scottish 2006 winner Phil Nichol may try), but no Scot has even been nominated for an Edinburgh comedy award since 1993, when Phil Kay got the nod. Even those who don’t take the former Perrier award too seriously would have to admit: that’s a heck of a famine for a host nation.
England, by contrast, only needed to host the World Cup once to win it. A facetious comparison, maybe, but shouldn’t home crowds give Scottish comics an advantage? Watching Scottish comics on the fringe, it’s interesting how few of them perform as if to an audience of compatriots. The working assumption is that the crowd is more British than Scottish, if it has any local character at all. The Edinburgh fringe might as well be happening in Sunderland, or Luton, or an airport lounge, for all the sense of local specificity you get at fringe comedy gigs.
There are exceptions: the Stand comedy club, which is in Edinburgh all year round, flies the flag for Scottish comedy, and several shows in its programme are proudly parochial. But those shows seldom break out; the industry at large never buzzes about them.
There have, of course, been Scottish comics who’ve broken through: Daniel Sloss, to some degree; Susan Calman. Frankie Boyle and Kevin Bridges are the two big guns, the latter of whom hit the big time without much troubling the fringe on his way up. My sense – as a Scotsman – is that the fringe may be an awkward place for Scottish comics to play. It both is and isn’t a home gig, leaving them – consciously or otherwise – in a slightly uncertain place.
Testing that hunch against reality, I’ve seen a handful of Scottish comics, randomly selected, on this year’s fringe. Matt Winning barely acknowledges his Scottishness, although he does – out of character with the rest of his act – reads a cod-Robert Burns poem at one stage, about current affairs. Richard Gadd, whose hit show just bagged this year’s Amused Moose award, comes from the adjacent North East Fife village to me. But his local origins have nothing to do with his act, nor his connection to the audience. Fern Brady’s opening routine is about how her friends mock her Scottish accent. She also discusses the way the media co-opted her voice in the #indyref debate. In other words, she happy to address her Scottishness, but her act is not tailored to a local audience; I’ve seen her do the accent bit more or less identically in London.
This isn’t a criticism. It’s just interesting that home advantage – the chance to build a rapport with local audiences; familiarity with local culture, etc – is being blithely squandered. Obviously, if I wanted, I could go to, for example, The Best of Scottish Comedy at the Stand. But I shouldn’t have to: it shouldn’t be ghettoised. The only act I’ve seen who is playing to a local as well as a general audience is Larry Dean, voted Scottish Comedian of the Year in 2013. He starts his set by asking the audience how they voted in the referendum, and his confidence that will be plenty Scots in the crowd is refreshing.
He’s not selling Scottishness – his act isn’t about it – but he performs as if aware that he’s a Scot in Scotland, and that this is a potential advantage. As a result, although I don’t think he’s attracting a different audience to other acts at the Pleasance theatre, the gig feels different. The audience lap up his cheeky-chappie shtick (in Scotland, we’d call him gallus), because he’s acknowledged that he’s one of them, and they feel ownership. “We’re about to go on to my first sexual experience,” Dean says at one point. “Cannae wait!” some old-stager pitches in from the crowd. Even the dissenters dissent for Scottish reasons. When Dean starts joking about his Catholicism and paedophile priests – a sensitive subject, presumably, in the sectarian west of Scotland – there are two conspicuous walk-outs.
Not only as a Scot but also as a festivalgoer who likes festivals that celebrate their host cities and cultures, I’d love to see more Scottish comics confidently claim that identity on the Fringe. Here’s to a generation of new Billy Connollys, and an end to that 22-year wait for a Scottish comic to be shortlisted in their own capital city for the biggest award in comedy.
