Pierre Novellie on the highs and lows of Edinburgh

Pierre Novellie is heading to the Edinburgh Fringe next week for a full run of his stand-up show Why Are You Laughing?, on at Monkey Barrel at 7.05pm nightly. Here he shares what he can't get enough of at the festival, his most embarrassing Edinburgh experience and the worst thing about the Fringe. Apart from the cost of accommodation, obviously…

Edinburgh binge

The best part of the festival, aside from the ready availability of haggis, is the fact that so many of the comedians I love and respect, certainly as comedians and often as people, are all up and showcasing their efforts. 

I never see enough shows, and every year I swear I’ll see more. The longer you do stand-up, the lonelier it gets in some ways – you stop sharing bills with your peers from when you started, encountering your old friends on the same bill as you becomes a rare pleasure reserved for new material nights or charity gigs. 

This makes August the most sociable month for us as, for once, we are in the same places at the same times. My goal this year is to try and be sociable and see everyone’s shows without inevitably having four pints of beer every single day and ruining my life and becoming puffy and slow.

Every year, I get obsessed with someone’s show – something in it will just hit exactly the right spot in my horrible wet brain and I’ll need to see it a few more times. Last year it was Josh Glanc’s Vroom Vroom, which I went and saw at least three times, which is when your behaviour becomes officially ‘hard to explain’ (this included repeatedly insisting to him that he record the songs and put them on Spotify). 

This year, I predict it will be Johnny White Really-Really’s Catland – I am already obsessed with his previous comedy albums to a degree that I would find faintly offputting if directed at me. Then again, there are a lot of good people up this year, so it’s all to play for!

Edinburgh cringe

I think bad gig stories are like funny medals you get for being serious about comedy, so I suppose they don’t make me cringe even though dying on your arse onstage is the sort of thing that stalks the nightmares of non-performers. 

Similarly, I try to resist embarrassment about getting super into someone’s work as described above, in the same way one might try to resist the cold. 

Actually, one year I bumped into a flyerer from the previous year, great guy, good fun, but I had deleted his name from my brain completely on the first day of September when that Fringe had ended. 

It’s always embarrassing to forget someone’s name but the wince of pain and hurt on his face when he realised I didn’t immediately remember who he was will stay with me for the rest of my life. It has visited me during several Scrooge-like hauntings in the early hours of the morning. Agony. 

He clearly felt we had bonded during the month-long struggle for survival and I had betrayed that notion completely. You can’t ever really make up for that sort of thing and it’s foolish to try. Doesn’t help that I can’t remember his name.

Edinburgh whinge

Aside from the obvious (cost, the sheer psychological toll of it all), it is too big. 

I don’t mean in the usual sense, I mean that it bothers me that you’ll never see everything you want to. It also sort of bothers me that there are thousands of hours of comedy produced up there every year that, generally speaking, just… melt away.

I’ve discussed this with friends and many of them disagree, finding the fleeting nature of live performance to be a part of its charm and romance, which I do understand. 

However, the sheer weight of all the blood, sweat and tears, all the treasure, the towering human effort poured into the thing… all that just melting like snow at the end of August? It can make you feel insane, like you’ve just spent the entire month painting a white wall with white paint, or trying to catch the wind in a glass jar.

I imagine that sounds romantic when you aren’t the one paying for the jar.

Published: 28 Jul 2023