At the centre of the Edinburgh fringe

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is in full swing, with new and established Irish comedians settling in for the long haul. How are they getting on, what’s been worth seeing so far – and why is it all like a ‘giant training course in Milton Keynes’?

THIS IS Fred Cooke’s first time putting on a solo show at Edinburgh. “I’m enjoying the sobriety,” he says. His slot is at lunchtime, which means an early start flyering on the Royal Mile. But everywhere he goes, he’s followed by two humming fridges.

“Hmmmhhh, Hmmmhhh,” Cooke gurns. It’s his impression of the intrusive air conditioning units that sit malevolently in the comedy club room where he performs. “When I first came in to do the sound check, I said, ‘you can’t use them, they’re too loud’,” he says. But when he improvised them into his set, the laughs were even louder. “I’m thinking of taking them home with me to Dublin.”

Cooke's show, a mélange of musical improv and set-pieces about social awkwardness, is called Comfort in Chaos, which became an especially apt title the day he decided to make his entrance with a smoke machine. "I couldn't see the audience for 15 minutes." But having a show on early in the day does have some advantages. "Someone at Damian Clark's gig got sick two nights ago," he says. "But that's showbiz, isn't it. You work with it."

Cooke is staying in a house with three other Irish comedians at the fringe – Aidan Bishop, Rory O’Hanlon and Colm O’Regan, who is in his sophomore Edinburgh year. “I know I’m here to lose money, it’s really a question of minimising losses,” O’Regan says. “Booking a small venue in Edinburgh is like having a small wedding. Your fixed costs are the same and you get less presents.”

With any luck, an early (deserved) four-star review from the Listwill gain a bit of traction, he hopes. While his first Edinburgh show in 2009 was "almost a collection of whatever stand-up I'd got so far", this one, called Dislike! A Facebook Guide to Crisis, has a thread to it, telling the story of Ireland from geological formation to negative equity formation. A builder's threat of legal action against him has now been worked into the set and gets some of its biggest laughs – well, that and his dry recital of a Mills Boon romance set in the planning department of a local authority.

His wife is coming over next week, which he is looking forward to, as it will help take him out of the Edinburgh bubble. “That’s the thing about Edinburgh, even though it’s so big, it has a habit of making your world very small. It’s like being on a giant training course in Milton Keynes where there’s nothing going on elsewhere and you’re stuck in the same resource centre.”

This year’s Irish delegation includes two male sketch group trios – A Betrayal of Penguins and Foil, Arms and Hog – who are both on their third festival.

“I think the first year we went over we brought the suits for the awards ceremony. De-lus-ion-al,” says Conor McKenna (Arms). “We were like ‘has everyone got the shoes and the polish. We said dickie bows – not ties!’ The second year you come over you’re just looking for a few nice reviews. The third year, you just want to put on a show.”

Foil, Arms and Hog, who perform tight, surreal sketches about everything from smartphone apps to sandcastles, were formed out of the UCD drama society, with the group whittling down to three in the years after college. “We were the only ones who kept turning up for the writing sessions,” says Seán Flanagan (Hog).

What’s their process? “I write all the sketches and I just tell the lads what’s funny,” jokes McKenna. “Usually, someone comes up with a kernel of an idea, tells the lads, then they bastardise that idea and it comes out as something completely different,” says Seán Finegan (Foil).

“There’s tears, there’s laughter, there’s tears, then there’s a sketch,” says McKenna. “Then that sketch gets done in a club,” continues Finegan. “Then it bombs, then we change it. Then that bombs and we change it . . . bombs, change it, bombs, change it.” McKenna interjects with a punchline. “Then we bin it and steal someone else’s material.”

Foil, Arms and Hog have a mock rivalry with the tuxedo-wearing A Betrayal of Penguins, a trio that comprises Ross Dungan, Matthew Smyth and Aaron Heffernan, who met in the Trinity drama society and whose show is on at the same time in the room next door. The walls in the venue are thin enough for A Betrayal of Penguins to be able to work the applause for Foil, Arms and Hog into their own show as an off-stage sound effect. “It’s actually two-for-one for the entire month,” says Dungan.

“It’s a fine line, how it goes each day,” says Heffernan, who worries later that their show that particular day had erred on the side of indulgent. During one typically high-energy sketch, Smyth had accidentally fallen off stage when he kicked a chair. It was hilarious, but the kind of thing that would be hard to repeat on purpose, he reckons.

“There’s nowhere to hide. That’s the amazing and wonderful and terrifying thing about comedy,” says Abie Philbin Bowman, another member of the Irish contingent. His comedy is about chasing the laughter that comes from someone realising they’ve never quite seen the world that way before, he says. The show partly sets out to deconstruct a complaint he hears all the time – that comedians like him who do material about Christianity would never tackle more politically sensitive subjects like Islam. He has a line about suicide bombers that attracts “dark laughter”, but he’s wary not to represent the religion through Al-Qaeda jokes, as that would be like equating Ireland with the IRA.

The cerebral set is political logic with jokes on top (unsurprisingly, his dream is to do an Irish version of The Daily Show). But sometimes attracting the fringe crowds is a simple matter of picking a catchy title. This year, he's plumped for Pope Benedict: Bond Villain and it seems to be doing the trick.

“People ask questions like ‘is comedy really an art form’,” says Bowman. “And I’m like, absolutely it’s an art form. I am every bit as pretentious, self-involved and obsessed with sex as painters, sculptors and video performance artists.”

JOSIE LONG

The Future is Another Place

“I don’t want to be ranting and raving,” says Josie Long. “I want to be writing a play about the Bronte sisters in which I have every role.” Long makes clever use of index cards, consulting them after her reluctant wallows: “I like cooking,” she reads out of one hopefully, before immediately returning to topics such as tax, the “1980s tribute government” and the false dichotomy between condemning and condoning violence.

****

ANDREW MAXWELL

The Lights Are On

Like Josie Long, Andrew Maxwell has weaved the London riots into his set. Unlike Long, he has no qualms about making riot-related jokes. “Seb Coe must be foetal,” he exclaims, miming the Olympic organiser curled in despair on the floor. Some of Maxwell’s best material is contained within this topical introduction, as he mines laughs from his own oscillating middle-class sympathies. “I’d love to smash the Ritz . . . or stay at the Ritz.”

***

HOLLY WALSH

The Hollycopter

Walsh’s well-crafted story centres on her headline-making participation in the Worthing Birdman, a festival where people “fly” off Worthing pier in homemade airplane-contraptions. . . and fancy dress costumes. The audience is shown TV footage of Walsh being chased off the pier by a comedy Nazi. Her bone-breaking impact with the water is then relayed with comic horror: “There’s never a good time to hear the words ‘get her a spinal board’.”

****

ED BYRNE

Crowd Pleaser

Byrne’s tales of new-father status culminates in the desire that he avoid becoming someone who prefaces every sentence with “speaking as a parent”. Anything that culminates with “the women in the audience aren’t sure how to take that” is unlikely to be comic gold, but he’s funny when he plays on his nerd persona. The best one-liner links his home life with his nerd riff. “I’m not a cat person,” he declares. [Punchline-spoiler alert.] “I’ve never been bitten by a radioactive cat.”

***

RUBY WAX

Losing It

Ruby Wax’s cathartic one-woman show about her breakdown is in fact a two-woman show with her friend Judith Owen, who provides mournful torch song interludes. The details of Wax’s story – a collapse at her daughter’s sports day, obsessing about Farrow Ball paint shades – provide the jokes, but her experience is universal: “demon voices”, jealousy triggers and undiagnosed childhood “hibernations”.

*****