My colleague Phil Daoust was essentially, of course, just showing off his amazing linguistic skills in his wholehearted enthusiasm for the French Monty Python show at the Assembly Rooms, writes Charlotte Higgins. For us lesser mortals it was a bit of a drag. Comedy and surtitles don't go.
If you, like me, have schoolgirl French, you half-get a joke and are only let in on the whole thing a few seconds later via the translation. It doesn't make for a crisp punchline. Or else you get the surtitle first and laugh, and then the performer has to catch up.
These were also cheapish surtitles with very strange typography: all letters with descenders were rendered in capitals, which made for a stranGelY offPuttinG alPhabet sPaGhetti.
It's a problem you get in the opera all the time. On the vanishingly rare occasion you get a joke, the audience always titters seconds before the poor old singer delivers the line. Not sure what the answer is, apart from becoming a linguistic genius. I just know I loathe surtitles - especially for opera in English.
I have to confess, I used to think comedy a truly primitive artform. I remember being dragged to a Simon Munnery show a few years back that was being hailed as fantastically innovative and forward-thinking (hey, it used digital technology). In fact it was dull and the so-called novel technological stuff deeply old hat, particularly compared with what was happening in the theatre.
This year on the Fringe I've figured out (at last) that one thing that comedy can do brilliantly is to react faster than any other artform to current events (the basic fact of the performer and the writer generally being the same person kind of helps).
It's true that one could tire of the innumerable references to July 7 on the circuit this year, but actually, it's what people want to hear about and some of the material is brilliantly inventive and very insightful.
The flipside is when people go on endlessly about stuff that was in the news six months ago that no one cares about very much any more. The election of the Pope? Jokes about white and black smoke? Sorry, that's so over, Richard Herring and Andrew Maxwell.
