Our look back at the Fringe of 2013

In 2013, Bridget Christie became the third female solo comedian to win the Edinburgh Comedy Award for her feminist-themed show A Bic For Her, while John Kearns was named best newcomer atop a strong field of nominees: Aisling Bea, Liam Williams, Matt Okine and Romesh Ranganathan. 

Here are some of Chortle editor Steve Bennett’s reviews from that year.

Bridget Christie: A Bic for Her

Bridget Christie has come a long way since her first Edinburgh, where every day for a month she would shove a Mini Babybel down a papier mâché hill to recreate the Gloucester cheese roll.

Her sense of silliness hasn't dimmed over the intervening seven years, but now she's applying it to a serious subject that's close to her heart, feminism, and without the daft costumes of previous shows. And the mix of the weighty and the absurd is potent.

That most people might consider feminism and humour mutually exclusive is one of several fertile strands of comedy. Christie makes several self-mocking jibes about an 11am show challenging inequality being a difficult sell, as well as the idea that there could be anything funny about the topic at all.

Yet she’s skillful enough to find a sneaky way to smuggle even some of the more appalling global consequences of misogyny into the show, while keeping it light. However, the bleak side is not the thrust of her argument; she’s largely concentrated on the drip-drip of everyday sexism, to quote a hashtag, that is so ripe for ridicule.

The title, if you didn’t know, came from a pathetic marketing campaign for pastel ballpoints designed for the feminine hand, since women have clearly struggled for decades with the hefty, masculine devices previously only available to people with two different sex chromosomes.

No rhetoric is so powerful as contempt, and Christie brilliantly deconstructs the sexism of Stirling Moss and his ilk, getting increasingly rabid in her incredulous rage – and winning extra laughs from acknowledging just how het up she’s getting or how exhausting the performance. She takes this anger to the outside world, too, and describes minor acts of direct action against lads’ mags she feels compelled to carry out.

The sincerity of her campaign gives the show a heart to match the hard-to-dispute logic of her arguments, which are nonetheless present though a lens of absurdity. Throw in the uniquely tangential way she broaches her targets, some sharp yet surreal writing, and a witty self-awareness of her own silliness, and you have a triumphant hour that scores on every measure.

Aisling Bea: C'est La Bea

So You Think You’re Funny? is Edinburgh’s competition for the newest of the new, so it usually takes several years between a comedian winning the title, and making their solo debut. Ivo Graham, for example, won in 2009 and has his first full show this year.

But not only has Aisling Bea come back to the Fringe with an hour’s worth of material just 12 months after wowing judges with seven minutes; she’s done so with a highly accomplished show of free- and fast-flowing stand-up that never flags for a minute. There’s a confidence and an energy – not to mention raw talent – that much older hands would envy.

Her material is primarily about growing up in rural Ireland, though it goes on many diversions. One cornerstone routine is about the big night out at the only nightclub for 20 miles. It’s only as I write that, that I realise what a over-done, almost hack, topic that could have been. But at the time, Bea tells it from such an unusual standpoint, and with such evocative description, that she makes it deliciously fresh.

She also conjures up the awkward talent shows of her childhood – stand-up clearly wasn’t included amid the more esoteric abilities else Bea would have walked it – and the brutality of living on a farm. But she found her escape through formulaic hip-hop movies.

Such rural isolation, she says, made her keen to talk to others whenever she got the chance, and that enthusiasm to fill the air with conversation makes her performance so lively and joyous. She delivers breathlessly, so pacy it seems as if she’s gabbling her way through an episode of Just A Minute, trying to speak without hesitation or repetition. Deviation is more of a pitfall, though, as she goes on wild digressions, both planned and demonstrating a quick mind for ad-libbing – stumbling on the South African in the front row led to comments about District 9 that couldn’t have been planned.

Little characters populate the narrative, but with a light touch, with the Australian Zumba instructor being a particular favourite. After all, Bea’s a trained actress, as she never tires of telling us, self-deprecatingly describing how futile those two years were. In fact, they’re standing her in amazing stead now.

There’s occasionally a routine with a bit of an attitude, such as her mockery of the toxic self-doubt women’s magazines drip-feed into their readers’ brains, but sharing opinions is not the essence of show that’s going for a broad, mainstream appeal. And who better to deliver that than this born comedian.

Romesh Ranganathan: Rom Com

For a man who hates talking to strangers, Romesh Ranganathan proves rather good at it.

His low-level misanthropy is a constant thread in this supremely accomplished debut, as he portrays himself as a grumpy loner, not keen to interact with anyone – not his fellow Tube travellers; not the old woman with her cat in the Post Office queue; not even, to be brutally honest, his own children, who are a constant drain on his attention. It all involves effort on his part, and likely to come to no good.

Comedians talking about awkward everyday encounters is what the TV roadshows seems to like, but it has put modern comedy in to something of a rut, given so many stand-ups now base their anecdotal routines on elevating their smallest faux pas into big deals. But Ranganathan strikes the perfect note, self-deprecating enough to realise he’s being anti-social, possible neurotic, yet describing the subsequent fallout from such encounters or his terrible parenting with embarrassed authenticity.

Also, this not the only arrow in his quiver. He’s got the race angle for starters, and indeed kicks off the show with it, dryly reassuring the audience that he’s not just going to bang on about his ethnicity: ‘Only about ten per cent of my show is based on me being Asian,’ he deadpans. ‘The other 90 per cent is about my issues with white people.’ Though to be fair, he does seem to have issues with ALL people.

But this opens the door to sardonic dismissal of English Defence League morons, the offence he took when he WASN’T abused for the colour of his skin, or how a well-meaning send-off from the school in which he taught was woefully misjudged. His response is generally to roll his eyes sardonically at the ignorance.

Ranganathan applies the same dismissive attitude to everything from X-Factor to the weak-bladdered front-row punters who cause a kerfuffle taking their comfort break. He’s in control of this audience as he must have been in control of his classroom, always ready with a withering putdown with an air of insouciant superiority. But even his own foibles don’t escape scrutiny: after all, what kind of awkward sod becomes a vegan?

This is a loosely constructed show, but flows easily. It’s is packed, but unhurried, and Ranganathan exudes a confidence, not to mention ability, of a far more experienced comic. In short, this is one Rom Com that’s actually funny.

John Kearns: Sight Gags For Perverts

Now THIS is how you do absurd comedy.

For this bold, hilarious debut, John Kearns has created the perfect oddball persona with a good heart but a lost purpose – then delivered a potent mix of excellent gags, playful interaction and self-deprecating nonsense with masterful timing and absolute conviction. Whatever dark alchemist’s secrets he’s deployed to mix these ingredients, he has forged comedy gold.

He is wonderfully inventive and fully committed to his own eccentric cause, making no apologies for the weirdness that hits the audience in the solar plexus from the very start and never lets up. Kearns enters the room in a tonsure wig and a moth-eaten horse costume, while Dick Emery-style comedy teeth give him a distinctively peculiar cadence. Why? Who knows. And while he ditches his steed, the rest of the defining get-up remains in place for the rest of the show, just for the giggles.

He indicates from the very beginning that his shenanigans may test the audience’s patience, giving us a chance to flee with our sanity during a needlessly lengthly opening number. None do – so we are all subsequently invested in making the show work, not that he needs our help.

He makes frequent references about how he’s inflicting this madness on us, part of a strong self-referential tone. Woody Allen’s comedy advice is meant to inspire him: that the degree of success a comedian will have depends on how funny a person they are, not their material. Then, after the most exquisite pregnant pause, demolishes the argument beautifully.

But although Kearns may question what he is doing, he most definitely is a funny person. Even an incredulous intake of breath is made funny, and his expressive face can make us believe he’s a tragic snail looking forlornly through a window, if he wants us to.

Pathos is at the heart of all this, below several layers of nonsense, courtesy of a lonely trip to Berlin, where he allegedly wrote the show in the throes of his misery. It’s enough to root his surreal alternate universe in the real world.

He has a few proper gags, but he is master of the non-sequitur, delivered with the most perfect timing to undercut the tension created by whatever bout of bizarreness he last spouted. These lines wouldn’t look funny on paper, it’s all in the pacing, which is always at least a few beats off the tempo you’re expecting. The most perfect example of this comes after a mid-show costume change, with a sentence apropos of nothing, that simply collapses the room to laughter.

Outside of Edinburgh, I’ve seen Kearns perform isolated chunks of material, and it’s proved hit and miss. When he’s allowed to set his own rules for his own show, it zings as we have all brought into this strange man’s weird world. The twisted, but non-threatening, audience involvement only serves to underscore that empathy.

It is a beautifully bonkers offering.

Ian Cognito: The Trouble With Comedy

Like David Baddiel, Ian Cognito is back on the Fringe for the first time in more than 15 years. And that’s where the similarities end.

While Baddiel, in his sizeable theatre and with the backing of one of Britain’s biggest comedy agencies, talks wittily about his life hob-nobbing with A-listers; Cognito is doing a free late-night show in a basement bar yelling to anyone who’ll listen about how he’s never been on TV and has been banned from more comedy clubs than any other stand-up. Both, though, are being perfectly candid.

Cogs, as he’s known on the circuit, exudes a visceral, confrontational dominance that would never fit on the box, but is perfect in this subterranean environment, both literal and metaphorical. He’s coated in sweat, as he belts out his gags and races through the ups and downs of his 30 years on the circuit. He’s not trying to be a likeable everyman, but the splenetic, opinionated loudmouth in the spotlight vehemently insisting: ‘I’ll say what I like, and I like what I say.’

That defiant, and almost unique, refusal to compromise has surely cost him fame and money – that and the awkward reputation for being dangerously unpredictable. There may be some underlying bitterness and rage at the way it’s all turned out for him, but these days his performance seems coloured by the acceptance that he’s made his bad, shat in it, then smashed it up with a hammer – and now has to lie in it.

With his V For Vendetta facial hair, he still cuts a rebellious figure at 54. There’s a frisson as barges through sensibilities with the unstoppable intent of a runaway train. But the in-your-face intimidation is the right side of playful, even if it feels that a single wrong word would set him off like so much C-4. This is not a comic you’d want to heckle.

But Cognito is not all swagger. While exuding this ballsy attitude, he strikes a gag rate that’s hard to top, although admittedly he draws from material penned over the full lifespan of his career (if we can call his years in comedy something so formal). There are gags here about Ronald Reagan, and the first tampon adverts on TV (1986). He must surely be the only person who’s done a Brian Walden impression in quarter of a century. Something for the kids there.

They are proper, sharp jokes; and care little for concerns of political correctness, even tricking a liberal festival audience into laughing at a wife-beating gag. You can tick off paedophilia and victims of Thalidomide from the bad-taste I-Spy, too. But he’s the butt of more jokes than anyone else.

Occasionally he stops during a laugh to gaze purposefully at the oversized stein of Guinness he’s brought on stage. He’s a proud man in all senses of the word: noble, arrogant and content with the gags he’s cracked – and this pose perfectly underlines the point. A smattering of songs, usually jaunty, occasionally poignant, pepper the set.

He admits to being an aggressive, angry man who’s screwed up in the past; but in mitigation he offers that at least he’s funny. That is beyond doubt.

Cognito, real name Paul Barbieri, died on stage in April last year at the age of 60.

• Click here for all Chortle’s 2013 reviews

Published: 21 Aug 2020