101 Things #18 - Laughfest

Sorry for the strange title but this item in my continuing series 101 Things I Refuse To Do Before I Die, is based on something spotted on the Spaghetti Traveler website. It was too long easily to truncate. Here it is in full:

Laugh the whole day at the Edinburgh Festival

 
First a declaration of interest. I have been to Edinburgh at Festival time more than once. So it is not the idea of going to join the milling throngs on Princes Street that I am rejecting. I may well revisit one day. What I am refusing to try to do, point-blank, is to spend a whole day laughing there.

 I assume that by "Festival" Mr Spaghetti Traveller (or whatever their real name is) means the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the anarchic and grossly swollen offshoot of the original (and still going strong) Festival proper. There is precious little comedy in the main Festival and plenty of time during the day when there is nothing taking place, so too much laughing as you hang around the Queen's Hall waiting for Brunnhilde to burn to death in Gotterdamerung will probably see you discreetly whisked away by the men in white coats. But is it really possible to spend an entire day laughing as you make your way wearily from one Fringe venue to another, jostling past the fire-eaters and the jugglers and the mime artists and the desperate performers handing round flyers for shows nobody will attend? Will you really laugh as you watch two men and a glove puppet portray the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire in forty eight minutes? A snigger as the East Solihull Players do Hamlet in Welsh? A few hearty chortles as a nervous stand-up fluffs a couple of gags about Brexit and how his flat-sharing mate is on drugs?

There's loads of good stuff at the Fringe, of course, but given that there can be 56,000 performances over 24 days - that's 2,300 odd each day, or up to 150 an hour, each lasting up to an hour, how on earth do you choose the most risible where hilarity will definitely prevail? No good waiting till the Fringe has begun and then reading the reviews because by then the really funny ones that everyone loves will be sold out. No, you have to take a chance well in advance on what you think will be the most amusing, or simply choose at random on the day from the many that will have seats available. I know. I've been there, done that; though obviously not with the aim of laughing non-stop from the moment the remains of breakfast are being wiped off my tie to that final stagger back through the dark streets to a cold apartment.

You can now understand why I can say that the idea of arranging matters to provide the continuous chuckling that underpins this bucket list is so ludicrous. It cannot be done. You have to find a bit of time for lunch and dinner. You have to find quite a lot of time to make your way around Edinburgh. You might wish to break up the jollity with time out for a tea-break or a pint. What you cannot do is go directly from one gig to the next laughing all the way (unless you do it in a one-horse open sleigh, obviously). In any case there is way more to the Fringe than comedy. What a shame to turn your back on the huge number of other events.