When you see upward of twenty shows during the festival, there are plenty of moments of deja vu. The slightly older comedian complaining about young people’s “music”; the references to 80s pop culture; a throwaway gag about Facebook. The feeling isn’t overwhelming, because comedians are always reacting to and commenting on human experience and society, and those things are pretty universal. Besides, while the themes might be the same, the jokes are unique… most of the time.
I may be a ‘just in’ Generation Xer, but for me the abbreviation LOL …

Every year there are trends and themes that run through the comedy festival. It’s surely an accident – comedy, especially stand-up, is most often a solitary affair, and comedians rarely converse about their material during its development. It’s like Hollywood producing Deep Impact and Armageddon at the same time – a possible coincidence, but probably informed by the same influences behind the scenes. (The Internet informs me that this year it’s “mall cop comedies” Paul Blart: Mall Cop and Observe and Report.)
So what’s going on in comedy this year?
First there’s …

I’m hardly the first to wax lyrical (ha!) on the art of musical comedy, but of all the comedy arenas it’s one of the ones I get geekiest about. There’s a great lineage there, perhaps a clearer one than many other kinds of comedy – no doubt because it can be attached to the history of music, itself a fascinating area of study. From the high comedy art of Victor Borge and PDQ Bach through seminal satirists Tom Lehrer and Flanders and Swann, the musical parody and punk-inspired anarchy of …

As I discussed in my first post, science is being discussed more and more by mainstream comedians. As a specialist science comedian, I’m always very careful to make sure my science is correct. Other comedians aren’t always so careful – and not just about science. Each week I hope to correct factual errors I’ve seen or heard about in the festival. I’m not a complete killjoy – the jokes come first – but if you present a fallacy as fact, all bets are off. After all, this is the twenty …

There are plenty of kinds of comedy geekery, and I hope to chronicle them all, but let’s start with a classic: the comedy lecture. It’s been used by Andy McClelland, Lawrence Leung, even James Pratt’s grotesque character Sebastian Flange. Comedy lectures are about something. Their core audiences are people interested in the topic, and so that topic takes centre stage alongside the performers. This sets comedy lectures apart from shows which are “about” something, but deliver maybe five minutes of material on the subject.
Let’s get nerdily analytical, and using as …

“What do you recommend?”
“Well, what sort of stuff do you like?”
“Something funny!”
Every comedian, festival volunteer and – especially – info booth and WOT Squad worker knows this routine off by heart. (Janet A. McLeod is a champion at the game.) We’re supposed to be experts: surely we know what’s good and what’s not? Of course, it’s never that simple.
Comedy, like all art, is incredibly subjective. I’m not about to get all po-mo on you here, but it’s clear that plenty of people actually find, say, Big Bang Theory or Kath …

What is geek comedy? It’s an important question, since a) I’ll be writing about it and b) it’s supposedly on the rise. The UK Telegraph recently ran an article titled “Science doesn’t make good comedy? You must be joking…“, in which such luminaries as Robin Ince and Tim Minchin explained why they do material about science. Minchin himself is a self-described “rock ‘n’ roll nerd”, and that’s also the title of the documentary charting his rise to fame.
If someone of Minchin’s calibre and success is a nerd, then surely the …