What ‘doing the Edinburgh Festival’ means to comedians and why it’s your civic duty to attend

The Outsiders: Up next in his series, comedian Dan Antopolski guides us through the festival’s jargon and his early years among comedy greats

(Illustration by Tom Ford)

The Edinburgh Festival is under way and I urge you to go. Many of my comedian colleagues will just have arrived and they require your presence on the seats to distinguish their performance from a soundcheck.

Performing at the Edinburgh Festival for the month of August is so habitual for many of my ilk that we use the word “Edinburgh” metonymically for the word “August” and synecdochally for “the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.” Utterances common in the spring months include “Are you doing Edinburgh?” and “I’d love to but let’s catch up properly during Edinburgh”.

The Edinburgh fringe started as a theatre festival. Now comedy has more or less taken it over – sorry about that. But the association has improved comedy, if only because the culture of longer timeslots requires a more thoughtful approach to form. There are fantastic live experiences to be had this month.

For comedians, “to do Edinburgh” means to write and perform a show for the duration of the festival. Compare “Are you doing Edinburgh, Debbie?” with “Are you doing Dallas, Debbie?” You can see how the location affects the semantics.

Doing Edinburgh means a month-long run of daily performances of an hour-long show, plus extra shows if it’s a hit, plus other assorted stand-up gigs, plus short promotional spots in lunchtime anthology shows for the Radio 4 crowd, if that’s your thing. Many people do more than one full solo show every day, plus perhaps a play, plus alcohol, plus intrigue – it is exhausting. I did over a hundred performances one August, though I think the record must stand at double that figure.

If someone asks you if you are doing Edinburgh and you are only performing for part of the festival, you may answer yes, but you must rush to provide specifics, for to do Edinburgh truly is to be assumed to join in the comradeship of adrenaline, fatigue, ambition, debt and the alternating euphoria and depression of the gigs, which vary wildly in character and success from one night to the next, pummelling your heart. It is a little war, one which changes you slightly – and one which of course doesn’t matter at all.

In the early years you have to flyer for your own shows too, in what few hours you are offstage. In 1998, Howard Read and I conducted neurolinguistic field experiments in which we mumbled enigmatic phrases as we offered our flyers to passersby, to increase their receptivity. We had most luck with “You failed the test”: people would take the flyer and scan it with furrowed brow as they walked away, hoping to find the path to redemption somewhere in the small print. “You passed the test” was far less effective. High numbers worked also: if we muttered “twelve thousand” while proffering our flyer, a person would be more likely to take it. Perhaps they thought it was money – or the population of a thrillingly endangered species. Interestingly, effective numbers topped out at about 25,000 – above that they were alienating. Please continue our research.

For comedians, ‘to do Edinburgh’ means to write and perform a show for the duration of the festival. Compare ‘Are you doing Edinburgh, Debbie?’ with ‘Are you doing Dallas, Debbie?’ 

“To win Edinburgh” is a phrase used ignorantly to mean “to win the Edinburgh Comedy Award”, formerly and enduringly known as the Perrier Award, despite Perrier having withdrawn their sponsorship years ago – marketing dollar well spent. This is a syntax derived from “to win the Tour de France” or “to win Le Mans”, enterprises in which at all the participants are facing in the same direction and competing explicitly for a prize. The media are always trying to characterise the arts as a sport, to appeal to the very animal instincts from which the arts are trying to wean us.

In 2009 I won a Funniest Joke of the Fringe Award for my pleasant joke “Hedgehogs: why can’t they just share the hedge?” and even this was referred to in various media outlets as “winning Edinburgh”. The joke lasts about three seconds. Anyway I checked and I definitely did not win the city. My attempts to assert droit du seigneur over the Lord Provost’s wife were met with ridicule and I was forbidden to urinate freely in my streets. What is ownership if not the legally enshrined right to urinate on something? I want no part of it.

I have had many great nights in that city but my fondest memories are from my first festivals, in my mid-20s, wide-eyed at the proximity to my heroes – and then having my own name known, impossibly, by doormen at performers’ bars and ushered behind the velvet rope to hobnob with the greats. It was so crap actually but it meant the world to me at the time. I once overheard Richard Whiteley, the late Countdown host, saying “saggy tits” in the old Gilded Balloon bar – then I knew that I was in the innermost sanctum of showbusiness.

Other projects prevent my participation this summer so they will be flying the flag at half-mast above Edinburgh Castle – my castle – but the fringe guide lists 4,225 other shows you might like to see. In fact it is your civic duty.