DAY 2: UK vs NYC COMEDY

EDINBURGH DIARY

I woke at 11 not feeling my best cause I drank more than I admitted to yesterday. 

I heard Eric and Max talking about getting to a noon one liner show. They were staying on two small beds in the same room in our Air BnB while I lorded over the big room, cause a random number generator declared me king. 

There was a norwegian comic we knew from New York on the show. We were kinda seeing him as the golden goose of our salvation, networking-wise. He’d been at the festival all month getting spots.

He greeted us coldly. Which spooked us, goose-wise.

We went to take a seat and the show started. 

The norwegian comic had a pretty good set. 

Afterwards he warmed up (these scandinavians need a second), bantered with us and introduced us to the producer. He introduced Eric as a one-liner comic, and the producer gave Eric a spot on the show tomorrow.

I don’t think of Eric as a one-liner comedian, but a lot of people do. 

I think the definition of one-liners is very contestable. In my mind, the platonic ideal of a one-liner is a one sentence joke which ends in a pun and is followed by an unrelated joke. 

The problem is, a whole show of this is very unpleasant, and so they had to loosen up the restrictions. 

We told the norwegian we’d meet up with him later. 

We walked over to the other side of town for another show. It was sunny, and the walk was crisp and pleasant.

Of course, the oddity of the cars going different ways than I’m used to, the jutty nature of the sidewalks, and my propensity for jaywalking makes for some rickety tightrope ambulating. 

Can’t tell you how many buses just missed. 

The show was across the street from where we ate breakfast the first day. Still have not gotten a feel for this city. It feels like a new path is always emerging.

But it’s quite picturesque. The castles and old buildings and hills give the city an austere aura. Must’ve been some hardnosed fuckers living here back in the day to handle this wind.

There was a comic outside barking for the show. Small lanky frame like the portuguese dude from yesterday. Spanish accent. My hunch was right: another iberian fellow. Didn’t like his vibe immediately. 

We told him we were comics from New York and his eyes rolled so hard they basically popped out of his head.

Said New York comics come to London all the time full of bluster and eat shit because the UK audiences are so much tougher.

From what we seen we were like, “NOOOOOOOOO.”

He told us people here don’t even wanna see tapes from newyorkers cause they got such a low opinion of them. That we basically had no chance to get booked anywhere.

None of the rejection we’d gotten so far was even phasing me, but with this guy it was immediate beef.

Eric “appreciated his candor”.

We shook his hand and smiled and thanked him for the advice and I did everything I could not to smack him. 

We got breakfast. 

Next move was to meet up with this moldovan comic we knew. We knew her from New York too and she was getting lots of spots.

Hoping she could help us navigate.

She was still at a show, so Max wanted to go to a park. It seems like most of the parks are gated closed. 

You see monuments and statues here everywhere and most of them are devoted to St. Andrew. He was one of Jesus’s disciples, but as far as I can tell, he don’t got jackshit to do with Scotland.

Gonna have to interrogate a local about this. 

Eric & Max were goofing off, practicing their smolders, just in case we had to be sexy. I didn’t think either of them were very good. 

Gaby facetimed me and we let her be the judge. She said Eric’s gave her a bone-chilling fright and Max’s just looked like a regular pleasant dude.

“Neither of them were even in the realm of smoldering,” apparently. 

No winner was declared. 

An hour later we were sitting at a bar with the moldovan comic and her cousin-who’s-actually-her-aunt.

It strikes me as really difficult not to drink all day in this city. 

The moldovan comic was burnt out from her month in Edinburgh, which seemed to be a common take.

We had a couple drinks in a stinky spacious bar and went back outside. 

The early morning sunshine was transforming into a bitter windy cold. 

At this point, Eric didn’t have a jacket. He was in a t-shirt the whole time, elbows out, looking like a fool.

He didn’t wanna wear my hoodie cause “it was too big”.

I kept telling him he shouldn’t put these limits on himself. That he should expand the container of his mind.

When the moldovan cousin-who’s-really-an-aunt found out he was jacketless, she made it her mission to clothe him.

We went to Uniqlo. Which was inexplicably bustling. 

She didn’t strike me as a sartorial savant, but he was following her around and heeding her judgment.

Me and Max were enamored by this mauve zip-up fleece, but Eric ended up getting a camel hooded zip up. 

I took the size tag and stuck it on his back. The cousin-who’s-really-an-aunt spoiled my bit. She was really looking out for Eric.

We lingered around with the moldovans. I had a hot dog, feeling nostalgic for my hemisphere.

She did end up connecting us with a guy who booked all three of us on a show tomorrow. 

This day, our only booked show was at 1AM. It was our buddy from New York, Papi, running it. So we had a lot of time to kill.

We ditched the eastern block and got dinner at an Indian restaurant.

 It seemed like a legit place cause the dining room was full of Indians, and we were escorted over to a small little section way off the beaten path which seemed like the section for imperialist scum. 

I like to think I’m an adventurous eater. 

But the truth is I refuse to touch cheese on anything except for pizza, and I had my first blueberry on August 13, 2024. 

This was the first real Indian restaurant I’d ever been to in my life. And it was completely amazing. 

Finally, at 1AM, we circumnavigated some alleyways and pulled up on Papi.

He’d been here all month and was finally feeling burnt-out, but his show was going well.

There were 15 people in the room. All white between 40 and 50 and hammered. One dude was blackout, wearing a suit jacket. 

He kept sticking his whole hand in his beer and asking Papi the same incomprehensible question over and over again. 

I was up first. Papi did 2 minutes and brought me up. I opened with material but quickly shifted into raucous, abrasive crowdwork.

I was starting to think maybe the Iberian fucker was onto something. These crowds were certainly different.

I did pretty well. Certainly made a lot of noise.

Max followed me and did his jokes.

And then Eric went next and did pretty well.

A british woman went up afterwards, and she did crowd work that I literally could not understand for 10 minutes. 

Papi closed the show with a stupendous foot-tambourine kazoo guitar number. 

On the way home we smoked a joint and Eric said, “if you learn to kill in these rooms for a month, you’ll be the worst comic in New York when you get back.”

That was a big consolation to Max.