Viewer's Digest: September 21, 2024

Earlier this month, I wrote about my visit to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. I focused on my time as a performer, doing guest spots in stand-up compilation shows, with mixed but—to me, at least—fulfilling results. I mentioned some of the highlights I experienced as an audience member—watching Tony Law, Rose Matafeo, and David O’Doherty—but I didn’t get to write about them. This is my chance.

Tony Law is a Canadian comic whose shtick involves the fact—or pretense—that his show is unstructured, unrehearsed, and largely improvised from a germ of prepared material that peters out about 5-10 minutes in—and is in any case “shit.” Most stand-ups work from a script but create the illusion of spontaneity in performance; with Law, it is genuinely hard to tell how much is planned and how much unpredicted, even by him.

Here’s a brilliant scripted bit about being too lazy to finish writing jokes: