The quiet before whatever will come

Responding to great popular demand (thanks, Adrian) I'm resuming the daily schedule of this Edinburgh diary. Here I am, in the city itself. After an uneventful journey I arrived at Haymarket station, where my showmate (and now flatmate) Cecilia came to escort me to our new temporary home. The flat makes a huge difference from the cesspit where I stayed last year, it's bright and feels very clean and fresh. We soon went to check out the venue and to verify that the posters and fliers had arrived as promised. The confirmation that they did came as soon as we entered the venue, given that the staff recognised us from the posters. We had a look at the room itself and I found confirmed all the drawbacks I remembered from watching shows there, above all the passage to the kitchen and the ladies toilet. Somebody from the stuff told us not to "take the piss" out of the people going to the ladies, which given my interest in idioms gave me a lot to think about. We also went to Fringe Central, where I met the always supportive Ivor Dembina, the first familiar face I have seen this year. He very honestly agreed with my analysis that last here I overstretched myself and I'm grateful to him for this. I have now come to terms with that recognition and I'm really looking forward to a festival in which I can feel more confident and relaxed. Or at least this is how I was feeling until I saw a HUGE poster of Frisky and Mannish, a duo that shared with me the stage of the Hackney Empire final two years ago. Now, I don't know why that should impress me, they were already big back then and as a cabaret act they are not somebody I can feel in competition with. But I couldn't help thinking that they probably don't have the problem of their room being crossed by the passage to the ladies toilet. For a moment I thought of Edinburgh as some sort of school reunion, where it's almost impossible not to compare achievements, disappointments and belly sizes. But it was just a moment. This year I feel that I have my strongest set so far and that I can both enjoy myself and demonstrate something to the others. If that requires a bit of staff-disapproved piss taking... well, let it flow.

Can't wait

Even before it opens, this year’s Edinburgh Fringe has already taught me the first, precious lessons. The previews are going very well and I’m really enjoying doing them. This might sounds unremarkable, but for me it marks a striking difference from where I was at this stage last year and it makes me think about what went wrong back then.
This will be my third as a performer. Two years ago my debut was a half hour free show that was received very well, earning me, among other things, a very good review from The Scotsman’s Kate Copstick, which I have been quoting at every opportunity ever since. Last year I decided to do a paid-for one hour show and it was, to use a nice English expression, a completely different kettle of fish. I really struggled to get decent audience numbers, I lost a lot of money and the reviews’ range spanned from the very bad to the quite bad. The reasons very multiple. One was that I tried to make my show “thematic”, but this meant that I had some parts that sounded too big-headed, while other parts were just not funny enough. And the pressure I felt meant that my performance was often quite stiff, I wasn’t really “playing” and I wasn’t really enjoying myself.
This year I decided to revert most of last year’s decisions. First of all, I decided to go back to doing a free show. Given Edinburgh’s level of competition, if you are not a big name doing a paid-for show means almost certainly that you are going to struggle. To make things worse my show was overpriced. For a venue’s promoter having ten people paying £10 or twenty paying £5 is the same, but for a comedian it makes a lot of difference, given that comedy needs audience like swimming needs water. I managed to have decent numbers only by giving every day a number of tickets for free, which doesn’t make any sense when you are paying for the venue, it means that you are actually subsidising people to come and see you. And last year’s well deserved nomination of Imran Yusuf’s free show to Foster’s Best Newcomer award was the sign that the prejudice against free shows is now a thing of the past.
Secondly, I decided that I don’t really need a theme. Themes are good if they “emerge” from the jokes themselves, but they are bad if they are imposed over them. One day I would like to do a thematic show about language, but only when I’ll have enough strong jokes on the subject for the show to become thematic “per se”. The same applies to having “a message”: as a comedian your message is the puzzlement and amusement towards the world you express with your jokes or maybe the pleasure and intellectual freedom you communicate with your word play and paradoxes. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan: the jokes medium is the message.
Thirdly, I’m not going solo, but I’m sharing the hour with two other comedians, actually comediennes: Cecilia Delatori and Alice Frick. We met on London’s comedy circuit and I was really impressed by how energetic, intelligent and funny they are. Sharing a slot is not only a way to avoid overstretching your material, but it’s also a great occasion to get continuous feedback from people who can see every step of its development. Not only, but you feed on each other’s energy and enthusiasm. Edinburgh can be a very stressful and lonely experience so I’m really looking forward to have somebody with whom I can share the highs and the inevitable lows.
In other words, I’m confident that this year I will really enjoy my Edinburgh experience and, hopefully, as a result my audience will enjoy their experience too. Cant’ wait.

“An Austrian, an Italian and someone from Slough” will be at Laughing Horse Free Festival @ Meadow Bar, 6.30pm,4-28 August (free with voluntary donation at the end).

BREAKING NEWS: Giacinto announces his plans for the next Edinburgh

It's the beginning of February and the plans for the next Edinburgh Fringe are starting to take shape. So, here are the news: I will do a free show with Cecilia Delatori and Alice Frick. In a sense I'm reversing almost every decision I took last year: free show instead of paid for, three hands instead of solo... the only decision I'm sticking with is doing the full run. So, is this an admission of failure? Have I survived only one season in the Premier League? Part of me feels that way. But on the other hand, last year's show was such a struggle that I really need to relax a bit more, invest less money and go back to having fun. The Foster's nomination won last year by Imran Yusuf has hopefully removed once and for all the stigma against free shows. And running a solo show all by yourself, I mean without a production and promotion team behind you, is really hard work. I'm really looking forward to working with Cecilia and Alice, they are of course comics I really like, they are at their first Edinburgh as comics (although Cecilia has a lot of Edinburgh experience as an actress) and consequently very enthusiastic and motivated. I really hope that the interaction between us can be stimulating for everybody. And, above all, that we can enjoy ourselves, a goal so easy to forget in that crazy pinball that is the Edinburgh Fringe.

I'm dissertation material!

An Italian student, Umberto Costa, honoured me with the request of an interview for his dissertation entitled "The language of satire and its development in the era of new media (Analysis of techniques, jokes, gestures and the processes that influence the public’s mind)". He also kindly agreed for the interview to appear on this blog, so here it is. Thanks Umberto for your interest in comedy and in the opinions of the humblest of its servants.

- Hi Giacinto, tell us a bit about yourself, your studies, your travels and what brought you to comedy.

- I studied Philosophy and I have been working in IT since graduation. I have now been living in London for ten years and it's here that I started to become interested in comedy. Comedy is huge in the UK, it's bigger now than ever before, so it's almost impossible not to bump into it in a way or another. One evening I discovered by chance one of those comedy clubs in the function room of pubs and I was mesmerized. I was simply amazed by the level of energy and creativity. But at first I really struggled to understand the jokes, even if I had been living in the UK already for five or six years back then. Comedy is full of topical and cultural references, puns and exaggerated accents. So I started going to comedy clubs as a challenge and as a way to improve my English comprehension skills. With the time I started to understand more and more and so to enjoy it more and more. Meanwhile I wrote a short satirical piece, a mock anthropological study on the British tradition of the corporate Christmas party. I wanted to send it to a friend called Adrian but by mistake I sent it to the MD of the company I was working for, also called Adrien. He liked it very much so, instead of firing me, he read it in front of everybody during the actual Christmas party, getting big laughs in response. He said that he had received it from an employee, but he thought it was better non to say who that employee was. I was flattered by the response but I also felt deprived of the rightful recognition. So I thought: why not writing this kind of stuff as a stand-up material set and perform it myself? I put two and two together, the discovery of the comedy clubs scene and the discovery of my comic writing instincts. The only thing I needed was the confidence to perform, so I joined a stand-up comedy course, after which I started doing my first open spots.

- How did you chose to do comedy in English?

- I think the explanation is in my previous answer. It's in the UK that I discovered comedy, it's in the experience of being an Italian in Britain that I found my first source of inspiration and it's in the comedy clubs of London that I performed my first sets. So I can say that English is my comedic mother tongue. Actually one of the subjects that interest me is what sociologists call "reverse cultural shock", the fact that going to live abroad changes you to the point that you actually struggle to adapt back to your own country. For me a clear example of this is that I would really struggle to do comedy in Italy and particularly in Italian. I did comedy in Italy once, but it was in front of an international audience and it was in English.

- What are, in your opinion, the main differences between the Italian and the English-speaking comedy scene? Some time ago I saw an interesting discussion in which Italian culture was described as a “culture of images” while British culture was descibed as a “culture of words”. Do you agree that this is the case?

- Yes, I think that's an interesting way to put it. Once I took part to a gig where the MC asked the audience to take part to a limerick writing competition. I was staggered by the number of people who did take part and by the quality of the limericks. Can you imagine the audience of Zelig competing with each other in writing the first "stanza" of a "sonetto"? Here people are educated to play with words since they are still very young, for instance through nursery rhymes. Newspapers readerships are in the millions. It's easy to make fun of the English tabloids, but their existence is the proof of how is spread newspaper reading is across all the social classes. The reason why Italy doesn't have tabloids is not that their readers are more sophisticated, but because the kind of people who would constitute their natural market simply don't read at all. It would be very strange if this stronger focus on verbal communication and especially written communication didn't have any effect on the type of comedy that the British are able to produce and to love.

- In our exploration of satire we have analized comics such as George Carlin, Emo Philips, Ricky Gervais, Richard Pryor and Bill Hicks. Has any of these inspired you or influenced your style?

- Not directly. My comedy education consisted in watching people on the London live scene, trying to learn from comedians who were just two or three steps above me and who were playings the same type of room as me. It's only recently that I have started watching the DVDs of the great masters and to go to proper theatres to see the big names.

- Regarding satire, do you think that Italy meets the right political and social conditions for satire to flourish?

- This is a difficult question. I don't think that the political situation in Italy is bad for satire, you could argue that it couldn't be better, in the sense that it couldn't be worse. What worries me is the attitude of the audience and the the influence of television. There is a predominance of character comedy and sketch comedy, often based on catch phrases. This seems to be what the audience expect because it's what they have been fed through television for ages. Here in the UK the live comedy scene is so big that most people develop their taste by watching live comedy and even TV comedy needs to imitate it in some way. In Italy, I think, it's the other way round, TV has created a taste for repetition and easily recognisable characters. There doesn't seem much room for comedians who simple say what they think, speaking as themselves. I'm not saying that you can't do satire through characters (Cetto LaQualunque is a good example), but you also need to be open to people who can challenge your patterns of thought by simply speaking their minds.

- Watching some clips from your shows I noticed that, despite your long residence abroad, you still have a strong Italian accent. Is it intentional? And what are the effects on your English-speaking audience?

- It couldn't be less intentional, it's the only accent I have got. They say that in comedy you should always address "the elephant in the room" and my accent is my elephant, along with my unpronounceable (at least for the non-Italian) name. It helps to set the scene, to introduce my themes, which are national identity and the difference between languages. And it might also make some jokes funnier. Of course the danger is not been understood, but if I stick to well rehearsed material I don't have big problems. At least not in London and during festivals such as the Edinburgh Fringe. I noticed that I tend to struggle more to get a good response in provincial England and the fact that people there are less familiar with foreign accents might be one of the factors.

- Do you think that satire can evolve in this media-dominated world? Or is it stuck at tackling the same problems in the same ways?

- I'm a great believer in the superiority of the live scene, where comedians are really free and where audience responses are really spontaneous. In Britain it's possible to make a good living as a comedian without ever appearing on television, which is something that in Italy and in many other places is probably not possible. This restricts freedom, since of course television has much stricter rules and is more conditioned by politics and business. But you don't need to make a living out of comedy, for instance I don't. I hope that in Italy and everywhere else people will set comedy clubs in bars, schools, restaurants and so on just like people here in Britain do in pubs, charging few euros or nothing at all and enjoying the total freedom that comes with this kind of choice. As I said, what worries me most is the question on whether the audience are actually ready for this.

- What are your project for the immediate future?

- I'll keep doing short sets in comedy clubs and I'll do something longer during the Brighton Fringe in May and the Edinburgh Fringe in August. I'll probably share the bill with one or two comedians in both cases though, I did solo shows in Edinburgh for two years in a row and I need a break. At least if you do the show with other people you can share the chores, such as flyering, which in Edinburgh is a crucial task. And I hope that the interaction with other comedians might also stimulate my creativity, as well as being good fun. Let's see.

Mackenzie Taylor, RIP

Last August at C Venues. among so much theatre and some comedy sketch groups, the only solo stand-up shows on offer were mine and Mackenzie Taylor's two shows. I didn't know him, but I got in touch before the festival and he came to see my first performance, answering my cry of help for the presence of two critics. I met him only briefly at the bar afterwards, thanked him for coming and mumbled something vaguely apologetic, to which he didn't reply, probably charitably so. The day after I went to see one of his shows: "No straitjacket required". It was the story of his battle with manic-depression and his attempted suicide and I found it compelling and moving. It was at moments very funny too, although it was wisely listed in the "Theatre" section of the program. I must admit, however, that it reminded me of what Ivor Dembina once told me about his own take on "not for comedy" subjects matters: you need to be careful of not being "too real". Probably the reason why the show wasn't listed as comedy is that it was indeed still "too real". Of course it might be the advantage of hindsight, but I got the impression that Mackenzie's wasn't too confident in the possibility of the irony and laughter to do that much for his pain, a lot of it was just laid bare on the stage, making sometimes for difficult viewing. This made it a truly unique type of show, in theatre proper in fact you know that every is fake, while here you had the sincerity of the best confessional comedy, but performed sometimes without the emotional safety net that comedy usually provides. Mackenzie was also running a second show called "Joy", with the intention I guess of offering a more upbeat take on things, unfortunately it clashed with mine so I couldn't see it. But I saw a short extract from it during the C Venues opening showcase: a funny and masterful comic magician's trick that did indeed show me a more playful side of Mackenzie. The idea of running two solo shows everyday for almost a month filled me with awe, unfortunately a week or so into the run I overheard some venue's staff discussing the scheduling for the rooms and saying something like "now that Mackenzie Taylor is dead". I asked them what they meant and they told me that they didn't mean it literally, but that he had some sort of breakdown and cancelled his run. And I didn't hear from or about him until yesterday, when on Facebook his sister announced from his account that he had "lost his battle with the demons in his mind". I cannot claim to have really known him, our paths crossed only briefly, but through his art he gave me and so many other people a truly deep glance into this battle. As cliché as it might sound, I'm very sad for him but also happy that he found peace at last.

ComedySubs

As a diary of my Edinburgh experience(s) this blog doesn't see much action outside August and the months leading to it. Instead, it's becoming a dump for my (failed) contributions to Chortle. This time it's an interview with the founder of ComdeySubs, a group of people who volunteer their time to write Italian subtitles for English language stand-up comedy DVDs. Unfortunately the editor of Chortle found that the subject didn't meet the requirement of being of sufficiently general interest (in his words: "it would interest only you and Giada Garofalo"), so here it is instead. One thing I didn't say is that I'm now collaborating with ComedySubs myself (I have just finished my first complete DVD translation, not released yet, and started on a second), in fact I didn't want the article to sound too self-referential. On the other hand, self-referentiality is practically mandatory in blogs, so I'm saying it here instead. Staying on the subject, on the ComedySubs website you'll find an inteview with me (in Italian), with a link to this blog. Be careful of not being caught in an infinite loop!

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Every cloud, they say, has a silver lining. In my previous
contribution to Chortle I wrote on how disappointed I felt watching a
documentary on how one of my favourite Italian comedians, Daniele
Luttazzi, had stolen most of his material from English speaking
comedians. That same documentary, however, made me curious about the
people credited for adding Italian subtitles to the clips from
American and British comedians used to show the extension of those
“loans”. I had a look at the website www.comedysubs.org and I was
amazed to discover a community of people so passionate and competent
about English speaking comedy to volunteer their time to write Italian
subtitles for many of the most classic stand-up comedy shows available
in DVD. Users can download the subtitles file for free and display
them along with their DVD on their computer. The catalog is impressive
and include the greatest names of comedy, such as Bill Hicks, George
Carlin and Billy Connolly. I then decided I wanted to know more and
share the news, so here is a brief interview with the founder of
ComedySubs, Roberto Ragone, aka ReRosso.

- How did you come up with the idea of ComedySubs?

A couple of years ago I was watching “Zeitgeist”, a web documentary
that includes George Carlin’s routine about the "Invisible Man". I
thought "Hey... this is a routine by Daniele Luttazzi, how come it's
in English?!". So I did some research and I found out about Carlin. I
had never heard of him before, in Italy he's not famous at all. When I
watched his version of the Invisible Man routine, I was awestruck. It
was so much better than Luttazzi's version! I just had to translate it
and share it. So I I added subtitles to the video and shared it on my
personal blog. After that, I translated other bits by Carlin, then
Bill Hicks, Billy Connolly and Ellen DeGeneres. My audience enjoyed it
and so, with the help of a friend, I decided to make the subtitling
project autonomous from my blog. And ComedySubs was born.

- Some people think that stand-up comedy is impossible to translate.
Your experience seems to demonstrate the opposite, doesn’t it?

I'd say that sometimes comedy is indeed impossible to translate. It's
really hard to convey a comical idea in the small space of a subtitle
line, especially when it involves a cultural background that is really
far from the the viewer’s. Most of the times we pull that off quite
well, but sometimes we have to resort to using annotations to
"explain" the cultural references behind a joke. We try to keep the
amount of these explanations to a minimum, but we prefer doing so
rather than going too far in the adaptation.

- Who is your audience? Do you think there is much interest in Italy
about stand-up comedy in English?

Our audience is made mostly of comedians and comedy authors.
Apparently Italian comedians love us because we allow them to gain a
deeper understanding of English language comedy with little effort,
for them ComedySubs is like a library where they can go and study
comedy techniques. Of course our audience also includes "normal"
people, who don't work in comedy. Italians, however, are not really
subtitle fanatics - we like our movies dubbed - so I'd say that our
target audience is some sort of a niche, but it's growing fast.

- I hope that this time those Italian comedians will not borrow so
heavily from the library! Actually, some people think that the
internet is making stealing jokes easier, but I think it's opposite,
you can't steal a joke if people know its real paternity. Do you
agree?

I totally agree. By popularising this material we also make it very
hard to steal from it. We are very well known in the Italian comedy
industry so any comedian copying from shows we published subtitles for
would be exposed by their colleagues from the very start.

- So far you have translated mainly American comedians. Did this
happen by chance or by choice?

A bit of both. Even though the USA are further away than England, in
Italy American culture, society and politics are more widely known.
It's because of Hollywood and the American TV shows, which are very
popular... well... everywhere. This makes easier for both the Italian
translator and the Italian viewer to grasp the cultural references.
Moreover, American comedians don't use the same amount of wordplay as
the British ones and jokes with wordplay are probably the most
difficult to render. In any case we're trying to improve our British
catalogue.

- You provide only the subtitles, inviting your audience to buy the
DVD. I noticed that you are very careful about never promoting file
sharing, but I got the impression that this is the way most people get
hold of the video anyway. Can you confirm?

Yes, of course people do a lot of downloading. We don't support it but
it's their choice. Personally I think that in a perfect world ideas
and art would be shared freely but there is a law and comedians of
course need to make money out of their job. So we invite people to buy
DVDs. I think it can work, for example many of our followers bought
Eddie Izzard’s DVD collection because it comes with Italian subtitles.

- Which brings me to my next question: I heard that you are trying to
enter deals with DVD production companies to include your subtitles on
their products, Can you confirm? Maybe you can launch an appeal.

Yes, we made some cautious approaches but it's not easy when you don't
know which door to knock on. So, my dear copyright holders, if you'd
like to open a brand new market for your products, with 60 million
potential buyers, on a very small investment, just contact us
(http://www.comedysubs.org/contattaci/).

Good luck with that. Thank you Roberto for your answers and thanks to
all the people who collaborate with ComedySubs for giving me, at last,
some very good news from my native Italy.

The Fringe and the FA Cup

Here is something I wrote for Chortle's Correspondents section. It will not be published since Bob Slayer got his article published before mine and he makes some very similar points. So here it is, exclusively for this blog's readers:

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There has been a lot of talk recently about the Fringe becoming too
professionalized and monopolised by big name comedians, for instance
in Harry Deansway’s contribution. I’m now going to argue that these
reports of the Fringe spirit’s death are greatly exaggerated.


We all agree that what makes the Fringe great is its openness,
especially at its the bottom end. Less known acts need to have the
chance to access it. The increasing availability of free slots in the
past year has actually made things better from this point of view.
When I did my free show last year, for instance, I found a slot
despite being on the circuit for less than one year and never having
had my a paid gig yet. Moreover Imran Yusuf’s best newcomer nomination
this year demonstrates that it is not true any more, if it ever was,
that doing a free show will condemn you to be overlooked by critics
and prize panelists.

Its openness at the top end, however, is in my opinion equally
important. The reason is that it makes the Fringe something similar to
another great British institution: the FA Cup. Taking part to it for a
less known comedian is like taking part to the FA Cup for a small
provincial club. You might end up playing at Stamford Bridge and in
that case you would of course be expected to be defeated, and
typically you are, but playing there instead of your usual crap ground
is already some sort of victory. In the FA Cup case this “trickle down
effect”, with ticket sales and sometimes TV right shared between the
teams, is probably more easily recognisable than on the Fringe, but it
cannot be completely written off in the latter case either. Big names
after all bring more visitors and more media and promoters’ attention
to the Fringe as a whole and everybody can have a go at taking a bite
at this bigger pie. Moreover, like in the FA Cup, there is still the
possibility of being the "giant killer". I think the Fringe is broadly
meritocratic, you can still be a big TV name and have a bad run, while
people like Daniel Kitson can sell out a big room at at 10.30am
without a single TV appearance or a single DVD under their name.

Without the big names the Fringe would stop being the FA Cup of comedy
and would just become another minor league. We less known comedians
don't need that, we are already playing in a minor league all year
round. For at least one month of the year it's great to have the
chance to walk with the giants. It's well worth the danger of being
crashed under their feet.