One of the rites of passage for a comedian is walking through the rain at the Edinburgh Fringe, looking down and seeing one of your own flyers being trampled underfoot. If you want a vision of the Fringe, imagine a boot stamping on a flyer of your own face — for ever. Or until the end of August, which feels much the same.
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Conventional wisdom is that flyers are the only way of making your show stand out. You can make the world’s best one-man production of The Mousetrap, but the world won’t beat a path to your door unless they’re handed a picture of your face and selective quotations from every review you’ve ever had. Selective quotation is an art form. It reached its apogee when the Scotsman gave the comic Jason Wood a one-star review and he emblazoned his posters with ‘A star — The Scotsman’. Some of the publications here make it too easy: Three Weeks is written by student journalists, who tend to write like students rather than journalists: thesis, antithesis, conclusion. It only takes a moment to eliminate the negative. When they described a show I wrote as ‘containing fleeting moments of genius, although most of it was only funny if you were drunk’, pressure of space meant that I could only use the word ‘genius’ on my flyer.
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Reviewers pick up on odd things. I have one line in my hour-long show about the Cameron administration — a silly joke about the coalition, which I follow up with a sotto voce, ‘Seriously though, they’re doing a grand job.’ (One for the comedy nerds.) A reviewer immediately wrote me up as the only Tory apologist on the comedy circuit.
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