‘Only a maniac would leave with their sanity’ - Jim Campbell on the unreality of the Fringe

Published on 11/08/2012 15:57

WHEN I was a kid I was a daydreamer. I thought that when I grew up my friends and I would all live near each other and that we’d all have careers doing creative things we love.

The real world isn’t like this, except that, if you regularly perform at the Edinburgh festival, for a month every year it actually is.

A month is long enough that you start to feel like you live here – not in Edinburgh, but at the Fringe itself. It becomes normal to perform countless times a day, for posters of yourself and people you know to be everywhere, to go to bed at 3am and consider it an early night. It’s the one place where comedians are at the top of the food chain. As a species we find this confusing, but our egos quickly get used to it.

The festival can be whatever you want it to be. It’s a boot camp, a trade fair, an artistic platform, a party. It’s best to accept things are going to get weird and run with it.

By around the third week everyone is crazy, other than the drama students, who are either already crazy or have gone so mad that they can’t stop playing the part of someone who isn’t crazy. It just isn’t normal and that’s the best thing about it. Ordinary is boring, this is extraordinary. Only a maniac would leave with their sanity.

• Jim Campbell: Nine-Year-Old Man is at Underbelly Bristo Square, until 27 August, 7pm.