The Listies on the best and worst of the Edinburgh Fringe

The Listies are on at the Edinburgh Fringe performing their family-friendly show ROFL at Assembly George Square at 11.50am.  Here they share what they can't get enough of at the festival, their most embarrassing Edinburgh experience and the worst thing about the Fringe. Apart from the cost of accommodation, obviously… 

Edinburgh cringe

 We're kidult comedians, our advertsed demographic is ‘kidults aged 4 to 400 million (dinosaurs allowed)’ and we like to think that over a decade of Edinburgh visits we've learned to crack a smile on even the most cynical of elderly Scottish faces (anyone 40+). 

However, the Edinburgh Festival has a knack for humbling the foolishly confident among us.

Our cringes have been legion, however the one we relate here happened at a daytime line-up show. We've done spots at heaps of line up shows in Edinburgh venues large and small: pubs, caves, yurts, Spiegeltents, tent-tents, and once - even an actual theatre(!). 

And while these gigs can be fun, their unpredictable nature gives them the potential to create the cringe-worthy memories that wallpaper a comedian's wake-in-fright nightmares and help fund their therapists' holiday homes. 

The fateful spot in question started poorly and quickly spiralled southwards. The audience had clearly had low expectations, and we were meeting them. Neither tumbleweeds nor crickets are indigenous to the UK, but I swear we respectively saw and heard both in Spiegeltent that day. 

I think maybe that the MC had perhaps overemphasised our ‘kids' comedian’ status, setting us up as antipodean Timmy Mallets for an adult audience racked with reflux from their classic Edinburgh Festival ‘yellow carb and beer’ lunch. But for whatever reason we were flopping on the boards harder than a freshly caught herring.

‘And now... audience participation!’ I said. 

This went down like a bowl of salted nuts at a slugs' soirée. 

No volunteers were forthcoming, in the end I levered a silent and deeply unhappy man out of the front row. ‘What's your name?’ I asked. ‘Donald,’ he barked, making it sound like a Scottish swear word. ‘Donald, where's your troosers?' I quipped - filling the tent with the sound of barrels being scraped.

Then, something weird happened. A strange sound came from the seats. The crowd’s faces convulsed strangely- My god, was was that… laughter? It had been so long since we had heard some, we didn’t recognise it. It was, they lolled freely.

It turns out this poor man had just endured ten relentless minutes of 'Donald where's your troosers’-based material from the MC. Our accidental callback delighted the crowd, instantly transforming these zombies back into humans. The comedy gods finally had mercy on us.

We finished our set referring to this poor man’s troosers as often as possible and then ran out of that Spiegeltent as fast as our shorts-clad legs could carry us.

Edinburgh binge

Tea cakes, tea cakes, tea cakes. 

The unquestionable Faberge egg of biscuits, Tunnocks tea cakes, are not widely available in Australia. But what is the reason for this criminal outrage? We wish we knew. 

Was depriving Aussies of this exquisite delicacy a punishment meted out on our convict ancestors, and the tradition of a ban stuck? Do they evaporate when the ambient outside temperature rises above the top possible Edinburgh summer day (22C and a bit windy)? Or is it because the words ‘Tunnocks tea cake’ contains so many vowels it takes the average Aussie 20 minutes to say (‘A taaaaaanaaacks touyi cayke maaayte’).

For whatever the reason these knobs of delight are the perfect balm for all an Edfest comedian’s woes. Their shape obeys the line of beauty (probably), it’s a bevelled dome with the faintest of nipples, the overall effect is of a delicious doorknob. 

Entirely encased in porcelain-thin chocolate, and mounted on a weirdly moist biscuit sits the tea cake’s main event, a strange white substance which I can only refer to as ‘almost-mellow’. It is not marshmallow, that chewy American thing with a dry skin best roasted on a flame; instead ‘Almost-mellow’, lacks structural integrity, it sits in the liminal zone between liquid and solid, it has the consistency halfway between lava and pus and is an intoxicating teeth-aching goo. 

But beware - the cliche about martinis applies: ‘Two is never enough but three is too many’. Every festival one of us Listies returns to the extortionate digs to find the other Listie has demolished a full box and is ‘almost-sorry’ about it.

Edinburgh whinge

As early performers (11:30am, anyone?), we're often met by a confronting miasma that fills Edinburgh’s poorly ventilated rooms. It’s a funky fug of centuries of stale beer, sweat, bad breath, last night's farts and overlayed with subtle notes of rendering bacon fat and hints of the brewery hops creeping through. Edinburgh truly earns its ‘Auld Reekie’’ status in these sticky-floored morning moments.

So, to our late-night comedy colleagues: if you're entertaining a fragrant crowd, please crack a window. Your morning successors (and their audiences) will thank you!

Published: 9 Aug 2024