Shows: Adventures at the Pleasance Courtyard and the odd slot at the midnight comedy show at the Tron.
Your top 3 festival tips please: Jon Richardson , Daniel Kitson at The Stand is a mate and he's pretty genius, and Greg Davies, he's brilliant, he's in We Are Klang .
Name: Steve Hughes
Shows: Heavy Metal Comedy at the Assembly Comedy Room
Local?: Not even close, I'm an Aussie.
Your top 3 festival tips please: Sleep, exercise and bring your own drugs. If you want acts, then Doktor Cocacolamcdonalds, it's a one man rock opera, it's insane. Also Seymour Mace: My Life as a Failed Superhero at the Stand and the Amsterdam Comedy Collective at the Tron.
The Spiegeltent is a pretty lively place for late-night, outdoor drinks, and it is flanked by a few venues that host cabaret and burlesque shows, including a speakeasy that you have to blag your way into (and then pay a tenner, which seems a bit cheeky).
One of the side-shows to entertain people is The Dukes' Box. It's ODing on novelty, the premise being a three-piece band who play inside a tiny caravan with lots of flashing lights, which acts as a jukebox.
You stick your quid in the slot and press a few numbers, which activates some oversized typewriter spokes inside, and the boys oblige with speedy bluegrass and cockney knees-up send-ups of songs such as Like A Prayer, Creep, It's Like That (And That's The Way It Is).
One nice touch is that you can peer in through flourescent port holes in the side.
Most comedians will have had their Edinburgh act absolutely pinned down in an elaborate wrestling move by now. That's what endless preview shows are for every July.
Glenn Wool doesn't scream "preparation" at you at the best of times, and anyone familiar with Glenn Wool's ramshackle, stoner style won't be surprised to hear his show can still wriggle free from his mice-like grip.
And he's quite unapologetic about it come the end.
The bulk of this show - Promises Promises - is taken up by his preoccupation with his quitting drink and drugs after a three-day beer and cocaine binge caused him to miss a marriage counselling session. Ouch. It's far from his strongest material - especially compared to his show last year - and most people have grown bored of "I was so wasted" stories shortly after university.
But his extended, surreal ramble that was the main part of his act really needed a bit of extra prepping. An audience can't go un-warmed up into a 20-minute 'difficult' piece about being a girl as a child with raging penis envy, who appeals to Jesus, Allah, agnostic God et al to provide her with one, with only his last resort - "Dinosaur God" - obliging.
It's a shame as it's a potentially great act, and he proves his worth as a witty bastard whenever there is any audience intervention.
The Royal Mile has been sorely neglected in my blog so far. Like a screaming kid in a fast food joint, ignoring it only seems to increase the volume.
Lord know which came first out of the supply and the demand, but the Royal Mile is a seething snakepit of self promotion, where Edinburgh comes to a stand still as frustrated drama students find more and more ostentatious and outrageous ways of attracting attention to themselves. Silly costumes, near nudity, eerie stillness, plain shouting, dancing, singing, snippets of their show, daubing the pavements, all these methods just to get a flyer into the hand of the unsuspecting.
Walk through too slowly and you'll be hauled onto a stage somewhere, walk through too quickly and you'll get the bends. I recommend just one portion a day of the Royal Mile.
Come sundown, the din subsides only to be replaced another odd phenomenon. Coaches arrive daily to unload thousands upon thousands of old people wielding cameras. You know those silly 1970s sketches - it could have been Benny Hill - where dozens of people file out of a tiny car? It's like that on a huge scale. And my God do they queue. They queue and they queue as only that generation can.
They are there for the military tattoo at the castle. I barely even know what the military tattoo is. All I know is they don't all come back with LOVE/HATE etched on to their knuckles. I'd be surprised if many of them do make it back in fact - it does all go a bit Saving Private Ryan come half ten when the climactic firework display kicks in. And if the noise doesn't get 'em, then smoke surely does.
When it's all over, the survivors shuffle off, and the men with flourescent jackets and brooms move in, firstly to clean up the pavements and secondly to clean up on eBay with redundant pacemakers and tartan rugs.
The Amsterdam Comedy Collective have a lot to thank Hans Teeuwen for.
Word was out that ACC were one of this year's surprise packages, even before The Guardian yesterday gave them four stars and claimed that Teeuwen has "the funniest 20 minutes of comedy at the festival".
It's not as straightforward as that though; of the four comics and MC that comprise the ACC (they take it in turns to do about 15 minutes of stand up each), it is only set closer Teeuwen that gets the belly laughs, while the other three comics toiled.
Perhaps it's a combination of the Tron's ability to intensify an atmosphere (it's a classic under-a-pub, cramped, sweaty venue), perhaps people were cutting them some slack for performing in a foreign language - which I'm not convinced they should when it comes to the pinguistically gifted Dutch - perhaps I just missed something, but the ACC weren't all that.
It's also possible that previous reviewers have allowed set closer Teeuwen to induce short-term memory loss and forget the rest of the gig.
Raoul Heertje had no memorable gags, Ronald Geodemond was confident and energised but nowt special, Theo Massen had the most offensive/funniest gag of the evening (about the slave trade) then lost the audience by betraying some very real, 1970s attitudes to women, with only the Graham Norton-esque MC Marc-Marie Huijbregte showing any invention or flair.
So no pressure, Hans.
Luckily he's a very funny man, and very, very silly. Slicked back long hair and black suit, he goes through a series of characters, starting with a comic crippled by nerves.
He sheds that to tell a story about a midget fireman, then after a surreal rambling about whether he prefers colour or black and white films, introduces Little Ronnie - a sock puppet who is in fact a rapist - and finishes with a song about Nostra Damus while banging an upturned bucket. The funniest 20 minutes on the festival it ain't, but it's enough to grant the ACC a...
***
After a morning of faffing about, changing digs from a student-ridden penthouse by the castle, to a more dignified pad by the Meadows, I head to George Street for ArturArt - a spoof exhibition by Balham comedian Arthur Smith.
Any comedians struggling to find that fresh angle year on year might want to stir fry some Smith in their ideas wok. Bit of a comedy veteran is our Arthur (of Balham, the self appointed "Mayor of Balham", no less) and he's risked throwing away the bath water, the baby and the bath this year, by staging a spoof art exhibition taking the piss out of modern art.
A show where you don't even have to be there to get good reviews?! It's either very very lazy or absolute genius.
Modern art is an easy target, but doesn't make it any less deserving (rather like Dubya), and Smith is having fun, letting his imagination unearth new levels of faux pomposity and superciliousness as he takes on Damien Hurst - whom he challenges to try performing at the Comedy Store - et al.
You are greeted at the entrance by a manifesto, hailing Smith as a semi professional comic turned visionary leader in the art world; a man who sparked an art movement so revolutionary, so iconoclastic, that it changed the world forever and ever amen.
The proceeding four floors of piss-taking involves staircases littered with clever dick statements held up as 'art' - "this picture is for sale", "the late worm avoids the early bird", "never attempt sex with Joan Bakewell" - and rooms containing slightly ridiculous installations. A few examples - the Leonard Cohen karaoke room, where you can join Smith in a duet of Suzanne (him in a TV, you on a darkened stage), and the looping video footage of Smith happy slapping various people. Which is actually very funny.
It all leads to a top floor monopolised by letters from or to, newspaper articles about or by and photos taken by or of... Arthur Smith. The artefacts making up this shrine have been shoved onto the wall carelessly, all genuine and many an amusing read, such as an ongoing bitch fest between Smith and a Daily Mirror journalist. I dare say this whole thing would bemuse any Americans who've sauntered in.
I've been to actual modern art exhibitions which are inadvertently more hilarious than ArturArt, but at least Smith has had an original, funny idea. In a festival full of attention-seeking and variations on familiar themes, this has to be applauded. The wise old head does it again - all hail the Mayor of Balham!
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The Royal Mile has been sorely neglected in my blog so far. Like a screaming kid in a fast food joint, ignoring it only seems to increase the volume.
