Another Festival Visit

So the Edinburgh Festival again. On Friday night I went through to see the mercurial stand-up Daniel Kitson (his website incidentally is rubbish). A crazy night was had by all. Beforehand we went to The Barony Bar with Anna and Fiona in order to help Fiona celebrate her last day at Scottish Gas.

As for the show itself, I found it to be absolutely hysterical. He's one of the few guys who can go on stage and shoot the breeze, while being consistently funny. That's not to say that he didn’t have any scripted material, he just made it all sound that he was coming up with it all on the spot. There's too many bits to list where I was to be found pishing myself laughing. I do remember laughing heartily when he took the pish out of Nicola, for being daft enough to shout out. The guy next to us had bellowed something incoherently. When he wouldn't repeat it, Nicola weighed in with a more readily accessible translation.
"Are you his interpreter?" Kitson stuttered, "First I get an indecipherable drunken rant, then there's this RP voice."

Rather than the usual one hour Festival show, the hirsute Yorkshireman played for more than an hour and a half. He described his last minute "Fuck I have to be somewhere," dash to the venue and then claimed that his fellow comedians, taking time and care over their performances were "Pussies working for The Man...or some may say that they were professionals with a modicum of respect for their audience, but I think my point is made."

In his early shows Kitson's material centred often around his stutter, and while his audience now knows all about it, he can still command a lot of laughs on just that speech disorder.
"A-A-A-A-A-A-A-re you j-j-j-j-j-j-just laughing at my s-s-s-s-tutter?"

The scripted material centred around his broken love affair, "It broke down due to the distance and her proclivity for occasionally sleeping with other men," his inability to dance and his dislike for people in general.

All in all a cracking gig that had me in tears of laughter.

As for celeb spotting, this time I saw Ewen Bremner on Princes Street, comedian Milton Jones as he arrived for his gig at The Stand and walking along the street together, Miles Jupp from TV's Balamory and star of flop sitcom The Savages and a Crunchie advert Marcus Brigstocke. Nicola also insisted that we saw Andy Gray, Chancer from TV's oft-forgotten City Lights.

I also won tickets to see Brendon Burns though couldn't go.