The Edinburgh fringe started with a stunt last week: comedian Adam Kay “unveiled the world’s first ever show written entirely in emojis” – or at least, that’s what the papers said. In fact, he translated some familiar jokes into emojis for a window display at the mobile phone store Three. A knock-knock joke became some pictures of doors and knuckles. “What did the bee say to the sunflower?” is replaced by the words “what” and “did” and a picture of a bee, a speech bubble and a sunflower. “Emoji,” said Kay, presumably thinking of the paycheck, “is probably the hardest language I’ve ever had to tackle.”
“Emojis are clearly a crucial part of culture and communication today,” he added. “In a few years there’ll probably be whole Edinburgh fringe shows just in emoji form.” In fact, we may not have to wait that long. There’s already an extended section in musical comic Jenny Bede’s show Don’t Look at Me about her love of emojis, including a song written largely in emoji. One of the funniest jokes in Chris Turner’s show is about the typographical habit of expressing hugs and kisses as x’s and o’s.
And then there’s the argument which Liam Williams acts out at the top of his show, in which he urges the fringe to let him use an emoticon as his title and which ends with a fringe jobsworth shrieking “no emojis!” over and over.
On one level, the joke is just another means of Williams mocking his idea of himself as a tortured artist struggling to express the complexity of his thought. But the joke does draw on the new prominence of emojis as a common – bordering on ubiquitous – language, even while the etiquette is still being thrashed out; as something more expressive than verbal communication (a picture is worth a thousand words, and all that), but self-conscious and crude too.
So will we ever get whole Edinburgh shows in emoji? Probably not: standup is nothing if not a spoken artform. Yes, there’s a thriving subsection that deploys projector screens and PowerPoint, in which emoji comedy could flourish. But for the foreseeable future, you’d need a comedian to talk you through the material, at least as long as it’s just crude transliterations of existing jokes. (And certainly as long as you’ve got old-stager emoji-illiterates like me in the crowd.)
Jenny Bede’s emoji use is more creative. If there’s ever to be emoji-only comedy, it’ll need its own jokes, not repurposed spoken ones. But for now, she still needs to talk us through them. Or sing, more accurately: we see improbable combinations of emoji onscreen, as she belts through a rapid-fire lyric translating their meaning. There’s nothing literal about it: the creative, bordering on daft, use of emoji is the comic point.
I should add, Bede’s show is well worth seeing. An ex-musical theatre performer turned YouTube song parodist, her confident fringe debut showcases a handful of fine new comedy songs, including several punchy feminist numbers. There is one that makes Blurred Lines safe for anti-sexists, and another, parodying all those hip-hop songs about women’s backsides, that may be the best comic song about testicles since Flight of the Conchords’ Sugalumps. But if we remember the show years from now, it may be as a bold pioneer of an all-new entertainment language, as an exemplar of comedy’s restless compulsion to hijack new technologies and modes of communication, and find out what’s funny about them.
