Poet is Fringe's king of comedy

Published on Saturday 29 August 2009 19:51

A COMIC poet who centres his show on absurdly bad verse about relationships and sex won Britain's biggest comedy prize yesterday.

Tim Key's Fringe show, The Slutcracker, also ranges from bizarre short films to his ridiculous attempt to cross the stage without touching the ground.

"This is really quite humbling and overwhelming," the 32-year-old comedian said, after winning best show at the Edinburgh Comedy Awards, The Eddies. Judges sifted through 400 shows before awarding the prestigious 8,000 prize.

Key described his own humour as "quite loopy stuff. There's not many gags, it's just stupid and ridiculous."

Poems which have helped Key include one about an Eskimo: "Oliver built his wife an igloo/(They're both Eskimos)/Currently he is smearing blubber on the ceiling."

He was described yesterday as an original new voice, and compared to a young Peter Sellers or Tommy Cooper. A Fringe regular, he has already published a book of verse and performed on BBC radio and television shows such as Screenwipe and Cowards.

"If you just do something for long enough, you gradually get an audience who like your stuff. This Edinburgh I've found that the audiences have been less perplexed – they like what I do," he said.

Comedian Jonny Sweet, 24, who plays a young David Cameron in a forthcoming TV docudrama, won the 4,000 best newcomer prize. His show, Mostly About Arthur, tells the story of a book blurb writer caught writing for a book he hasn't read.

In a sign of the times, the Free Fringe founder Peter Buckley Hill, widely dismissed as a crank when he organised his first free show a decade ago, won the 4,000 panel prize. The PBH Free Fringe has grown to include more than 150 shows this year.

Tim Arthur, Time Out magazine's comedy critic and chair of the judging panel, said Buckley Hill had given some comedians their only chance of coming to Edinburgh to do "exciting, creative and unique pieces".

"There have been two or three shows which have blown me away, and they have been absolutely jammed this year."

Buckley Hill said: "It's a vote of confidence. On a personal level, its a payback for ten years of being called mad. A lot of people tried to stop the first free shows that I did on the grounds it was unfair to other comedians."

Arthur said of Key: "He has beautiful timing, a beautiful sense of the surreal and bizarre, but he doesn't alienate an audience. He's the next step. It's a multi-layered show. The more you see it, the more layers."

The awards were funded this year by their long-time director, theatre owner and producer Nica Burns, after no corporate sponsor could be found.

She is searching for a backer as she cannot afford to spend another 150,000 on them next year.