Two recommendations for comedy at the Edinburgh Fringe festival:
1. Firmly at the top of my list is the Pajama Men – Shenoah Allen and Mark Chavez – who are back at the Fringe after a year’s break. Go and see them.
I first saw them in the aircraft-hangar of the George Square Theatre back in 2004 when they went by the name of SABOTAGE!, reviewed them and have regretted not giving them 5 stars instead of 4 ever since (yes, wrong venue, but should have forgiven them for that). I hopefully made up for it by taking friend after friend to see Stop Not Going in the Pleasance Courtyard, their 2005 show which won them the Fairtrade Dubble (double? geddit? LOLZ?) Act Award.
Their shows make me grin like an idiot and have sent me away feeling happier about comedy, the fringe and the universe in general. Like many stand-out shows, it’s hard to describe what they do without selling them short: think happily hallucinatory narrative-sketch comedy performed by men in night-wear. They’ve produced the cleverest, funniest material I’ve seen at the fringe, which both sounds like horribly effusive praise and happens to be true. And yes, I dropped the effusive-bomb.
Versus vs. Versus:
“Romance, mystery, and questionably accurate historical references”
Assembly Rooms, George Street: 31st July – 21st August
Book at edfringe.com
Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/pajamamen
2. An entirely fictitious wise man of comedy once said that there is only one thing you can do after you’ve spent a fringe pretending to be Johnson and Boswell – i.e. spend the following fringe as Queen Elizabeth and Walter Raleigh. Luckily, this is exactly the opportunity that Stewart Lee’s new comedy provides for Miles Jupp and Simon Munnery.
As a vanishing small claim to fame, I knew Miles through Improverts even before he was an inventor who lived in a pink castle. Now that’s celebrity.
Elizabeth and Raleigh – Late But Live:
“Though I have the body of a woman, I have the heart and stomach of a king, the brain of a dolphin, and the penis of a hippopotamus. All I need now is some glue.”
Underbelly Pasture, George Square: 31st July – 25th August
Book at edfringe.com
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