In bed with the genre-benders

Published on Saturday 8 August 2009 16:44

THE Edinburgh Festival is a hotbed of creative couplings but one of the most torrid is the orgy taking place between comedy and poetry. Comedians, poets, stand-up poets, performance poets and comedians masquerading as poets are all toying with the possibilities that present themselves when comedy and poetry mix it up between the sheets.

They are a disparate bunch with different aims and diverse backgrounds. To call it a scene would be misleading. However, while the poets involved would bristle at being called comedians and the comedians would laugh at being labelled poets, they are all sharing much the same audience and are listed in the comedy section of the Fringe programme.

One of the most active figures in the mle is Luke Wright, a Fringe regular for the past eight years, programmer of the poetry arena at Latitude Festival and stalwart of the influential Aisle 16 poetry collective. As well as his own show, he is launching the Purple Ronnie Stand-Up Poetry Club in Edinburgh, which will include a spot from Phill Jupitus as Porky the Poet, his original stage persona before he ambled down the path of stand-up comedy.

"I've always been interested in writing poems that are funny as opposed to funny poems," is Wright's take on his own show. "I use comedy as a device within my poetry but don't use poetry as a means to create comedy."

He says most of the people he performs with regularly come from a music or hip-hop background rather than comedy but can see a crossover in the people that come to his shows. "We certainly tried cultivating that comedy audience so now Aisle 16 shows in London attract the same sort of people who might go to see Stewart Lee or Simon Munnery. I've always thought we attracted a left-field comedy audience.

"At Latitude, we were next door to the comedy tent and the people who would go to see Robert Ince would be the same people who would come into the poetry tent. It's people who want to be entertained but who also like theatre and read books and like to be challenged and do something a bit different."

Along with Wright and Matt Harvey, who is also in Edinburgh for the Fringe, Elvis McGonagall has a regular poetry slot on Radio 4's Saturday Live Show. All three would call themselves poets rather than comedians but McGonagall recognises that the word poetry can come with baggage.

"Some people have quite an odd relationship with the word poetry," he says, "so, if you call yourself a poet, they might expect some sort of reverential reading, a hushed awe as the poet speaks whereas, in fact, it's a very broad church. I tend just to say stand-up poet to try and cover both sides."

By way of contrast, Tim Key is very much a comedian, but on stage or when appearing on Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe, his lager-stained persona is that of a shambolic, not altogether successful poet. He admits he doesn't have a complete handle on who or what Tim Key the character is, but that ambivalence helps create the laughs.

"There are bits in the show and poems where it might seem deliberately bad but generally, with most of the poems, I try and write quite a nice one," says Key. "I'm genuinely trying to do it quite well. I'm trying to write a poem that is funny and that will make people laugh, but there are different ways of getting to that end game."

Key likens his relationship to his poems to that of Keith Harris with Orville. Obviously, he writes them the way he wants them but, if one tanks, he is also in a position to look at it "admonishingly, as though it hasn't done its job properly".

If it's hard to pin down Key's act as a parody of a poet then it is much easier to do that with former if.comedy winner Phil Nichol and his show A Deadpan Poet Sings Quiet Songs Quietly. In place of his more manic acts of the past few years, this is Nichol as a suicidal Beat poet spouting verse that has its origins in genuine poems he wrote during a dark time in his life.

When we spoke a couple of weeks prior to the Fringe, he gave me the opening lines for his show: "It was about love, it was about passion, but most importantly, it was about me."

"That sums up how I see poets," says Nichol. "I've written poetry for as long as I can write. The show is me making fun of what I went through myself at my bleakest period." v

Luke Wright, Underbelly, until 30 August (not 18), 6pm; Purple Ronnie Stand-Up Poetry Club, Udderbelly Pasture, 20 Aug, 11.45pm; Elvis McGonagall, Gilded Balloon, until 30 Aug (not 17th), 5.45pm; Tim Key, Pleasance Courtyard, until 31 Aug (not 17), 9.50pm; Phil Nichol, The Stand, until 30 Aug (not 17), 9pm, www.edinburgh-festivals.com