Ordinary Days: Beautiful, Poignant Work from a Composer We Need Lots More From

Welcome to Part 2 of our Edinburgh Fringe round-up! Today we are talking the two stand-ups we saw: American Gen X favorite Janeane Garofalo and British Gen X favourite Josie Long. We’re also talking about the show “Afghanistan is Not Funny” from Henry Naylor. You may be like ‘that doesn’t seem like it goes with two stand-up performances?’ and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but we are making it work because a) they are all two-handers so it makes sense (as does my version of the phrase two-hander to mean one person and not two because how many victims of chain-saw accidents are there in the theatre world? not many) and b) Naylor is a comedy writer and, despite the title, definitely fancies himself a comedian in this show! Was it all funny? Some of it was! Did they all start late and go long? You bet your ass they did, in true Fringe tradition!

Janeane Garofalo: Pardon My Tangent

The key lesson I took away from this set is that I forgot her name was spelled like that! Janeane was great to see mostly for nostalgia’s sake, and also because her jokes seemed tailor-made for ME! Not for the Edinburgh crowd, no sirree, it was all for me, from the perspective of an East Coaster trying to make sense of British cleaning products (awful!) and Scottish culture. Just like me! It was super New York (walking dogs around the city and getting jealous of bigger apartments!), super ’90s-era Americana (jokes about James Spader!), super left-wing (unapologetically anti-Trump supporters!). She used the word ‘shanda’ (it means shame!), and even brought up my favorite TV show from one month when I was 13 “I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant” (I really only was interested because it was always on “The Soup”). I mean, no one has talked about that show since Kathy Griffin in one of her HBO specials from the early aughts! What a fun memory! “Ma, there’s a baby in the terlet!”

Janeane began her set in a remarkable way: by telling the crowd she never really was a stand-up comedian and is no good at it. Way to prime the crowd. She didn’t have a real set planned, just some notes and some off the cuff observations about NYC and Edinburgh. It was chaotic and messy, but still fun and enjoyable, at least for me, because I was the target audience. (I can’t say the drunk-off-her-ass-jerky girl behind me who was talking the whole time and kicking my seat enjoyed it as much.) The vibe I got was mostly that we could be, and should be, best friends.

She told a ridiculous story about how she was hit by a car in New York recently, but it wasn’t really the driver’s fault because “I was wearing these pants.” Reader, she was wearing camo print pants. I loved her jokes about her upper body strength, because as soon as she came onstage in her tank top I thought ‘man she looks ripped’. And lo and behold, later she talked about how we audience members may have assumed that she had muscle, but it was all an illusion she meticulously created: by pulling her bra straps and shirt straps high and tight behind her neck, almost like a halter (which she highly recommended we try) and by having strategically placed tattoos that made it seem like her delts were coming to a point. All of this together gave the facade of musculature from the front, while the people on the sides of the room could see it was all loose meatbags. I was dying, it was all so true, it really had worked on me.

The best thing about Janeane is how unapologetically left-wing she is, and rightly so. Now that Trump is out of office (omg hopefully forever but who knows) people seem less actively angry towards his supporters because it’s not as urgent a threat, but NOT JANEANE! She knows that we can never forgive, never forget, that they aren’t ‘decent peace-loving people’ BY DEFINITION. Loved her for this! I also loved that she makes relentless fun of Tom Cruise and got in a fight with her brother about it. Please let’s be friends!

INFORMATION: Janeane is playing at the Wine Bar at Gilded Balloon Teviot. It’s not even close to looking like a wine bar! There are some seats up in a balcony but mostly it’s very strangely laid out rows of chairs. The girl next to me was wearing a mask! First and only other masker of the whole Fringe!

Josie Long: Re-Enchantment

Let’s cut right to the chase (unlike this show because it started super late packing in last-minute wannattendees into the very hot basement (none of these venues had air flow, it was very concerning) which you can’t really fault because she is amazing and who wouldn’t want to see her?): This is one of the best, most cohesively written comedy specials I’ve ever seen. It was better than 90% of the specials on Netflix, all of which I’ve tried, few of which I’ve been able to finish. (No good!). Not since I saw Mike Birbiglia do his special “The New One” at the Leicester Square Theatre (which eventually went on to Broadway) did I find a comedy hour (plus 15) so well-written and performed.

The best part is that it seems so chaotic and casual, as Josie has such an open and friendly and spontaneous vibe, so it seems like she’s just talking, sharing with friends. But you see at the end that it was all perfectly planned and formatted. And HILARIOUS. She mainly talks about how she has moved from England to Scotland (all the cool kids are doing it!), about how great Scotland is (it is!), and about how urgently we all need to be fighting against impending fascism (we do!). For someone who looks like the nicest, sweetest mom at the preschool dropoff who brings cookies for the other moms, she is surprisingly and amazingly radical left-wing. LOVES IT! I loved that she told the crowd that we had to fight more, harder. That we had to stop making fun of groups like Insulate Britain because THEY’RE RIGHT. And they are! People complain about them and similar action groups because they don’t like their tactics, but, as Josie reminded us, that’s what people said about the suffragettes and MLK, and we’ve just conveniently forgotten all their controversial methods.

It’s funny that both of our female comedian shows made it super left-wing and political, but while Janeane gives off that great “don’t you dare f with me” energy, Josie has the energy of a little blonde girl in a flower dress wearing pigtails, despite being 40. Her bubbly joyousness is infectious and I have absolutely added her to my list of faves.

INFORMATION: The show is at Monkey Barrel 3 (downstairs) at the Monkey Barrel Comedy venue. It is VERY HOT and there was an AC unit, but Josie had them turn it off because it was noisy. If I didn’t love her so much I would be cursing her out for that one (okay I did a little). There’s a bar upstairs with water pitchers, but after the show they shoo you out directly to the outside world, so you can’t go back up for more water. There are small toilets downstairs in the back of the room.

Afghanistan is Not Funny, by Henry Naylor

Henry Naylor has some STORIES. This writer and actor and comedian was doing regular radio and TV gigs as a writer and actor and comedian 20 years ago yet somehow ended up in Afghanistan during the start of the war, alongside photojournalists and government operatives and unofficial government operatives. He went to research his previous show, but man, the average playwright doesn’t just up and go to a war to do some researching on a whim! He was here to tell those stories, and we wanted to hear them. Unforch, he’s focusing too much inwardly, and not on what those stories mean outside of his career and to the wider world, despite what he says to the contrary.

That first Fringe show, “Finding Bin Laden”, was a successful satire about media representation of the Iraq invasion. So successful, in fact, that it almost became a movie with Hugh Grant. We learn all of this, because the potential and then non-potential of this movie’s existence seems to be the crux of this show. Even though this guy saw the real effects of the American presence, even though he saw endless suffering especially among injured children, even though he was literally held at gunpoint by a group of Afghani mujahideen, the thesis of this show seems to be about him and his success and his almost movie-making, which it shouldn’t be. He even talks at length about how he knew that in this show, as opposed to “Finding Bin Laden”, he needed to tell the story of those suffering children, especially of a girl his photographer friend captured who was holding what could only be the wrapped body of a dead baby, this poor girl whose memory haunts him to this day, to finally tell the world her story. But he doesn’t. Sure he shows her picture in a big dramatic flourish that is clearly meant to move us emotionally, but it doesn’t because it comes without support — after he rants endlessly about how his movie fell apart because Russell Brand is an asshole who f-ed someone’s granddaughter, and he says this over and over and you’re like, wait, I thought this show was about the suffering of children in Afghanistan, not about this guy complaining about how Russell Brand’s lack of tact ruined his movie. It made such a brave and open man, who has been through and seen so much, seem self-satisfied in his storytelling, which I’m sure isn’t the case.

So, tonally it was completely off, and it felt unedited. It ran 15 minutes long, but it should have been 20 minutes shorter. It’s so interesting how much he spoke about his intentions with this show — he clearly wanted it to be about the people and the things he saw there, and yet he didn’t make it about that. There was a great format he used, going through four stages of awareness he learned in therapy (unconscious incompetence to conscious competence), but after the second stage it sort of fell apart in relation to the narrative. There’s so much potential for his storytelling — like I said, he was HELD AT GUNPOINT BY THE MUJAHIDEEN — he just needs to remember his purpose in sharing. We want to hear more of those stories, which would automatically convey the gravity he wanted to share, and all the real things he saw over there, and not hear vulgarities about Russell Brand.

INFORMATION: The show is in Gilded Balloon Teviot, in a slightly-more-professional seeming room than a lot of the others, but it’s set up in the worst way: it’s a very steep room, with all the seats reached from just one aisle, and the only door is on the OTHER side of that aisle. Meaning, you have to cross the stage area to get from door to aisle and vice versa. MEANING, if you have to pee or leave early, you have to literally say excuse me to the actor on the stage and force him to take a step back, as one guy did. yikes! And yes you may see that we were in Teviot for Janeane and you might think ‘oh how convenient’ but nope, we had a different show in between these two, so we were constantly running back and forth across town. Felt like a bloody boomerang! Plan your days wisely!