Dawdling in a cafe just off Market Street, I'm wondering how many jokes get told at the Fringe each year. Time for a little back-of-napkin maths.
So ... 1,600 shows, roughly 400 of them classed as "comedy" (hmm). Assuming half of those involve some form of stand-up and that they average an hour long each, that's 200 hours of talking each day. Say each stand-up performs for roughly two weeks of the Fringe, and you total nearly 3,000 hours of constantly produced hot air. The average English-speaker gets out 150 words a minute, so let's say 180-plus for gabbling, crazed comics playing to bored, sceptical audiences. 180 x 3,000 x 60. God. That's over 32 million.
So, it's quite a relief when you can go to an hour-long comedy gig and hear absolute silence. Nothing. Nada. Zip. OK, nothing apart from the laughter.
Gamarjobat's A Shut-Up Comedy from Japan, playing until the end of August at the C Electric on Clerk Street, involves little more from its duo of performers, Ketch and Hiropon, than the occasional quizzical grunt. Mime is, of course, hardly new to the Fringe - but this mime is slick, witty, and, darn it, massively funny.
Ah, the simple delights of an escalator-behind-the-sofa gag! What joy to watch two grown men struggling with a suitcase! A joke about cutting people's fingers off! Brilliant!
The second portion of the show is admittedly a mite weightier: an extended and mildly bewildering tale of a boxer staging a Rocky-style comeback, done with some dextrously realised slow-mo and a few cute wigs. But for the most part what this pair excel at producing is dialogue-free belly laughter, craftily and winningly achieved.
In a Fringe otherwise so obsessed with topicality - enough backpack jokes already! - Gamarjobat's classic comedy comes as blessed relief. They're sufficiently off-message to include a homage to Michael Jackson, for Christ's sake.
