comedy feature
3 Good Reasons: Henry Paker
Comedy Zone’s Henry Paker on the three best things about giving up a month of your life to perform at the Edinburgh Festival.
1. Ego Bungee
The Edinburgh Festival is an extreme sports holiday for the ego. To get through this month my ego will need wrap-around shades, blonde dreadlocks and sex wax. A good gig feels like snowboarding off the Empire State Building and executing a perfect landing on a ramp made of naked women. A bad gig can feel like being forced to eat a BMX in front of six bored alcoholics. I’m here for the extremes, and even if my ego finally limps onto the train back to London with a crampon embedded in its face and a nasty case of the bends, I know it will still be back next year, looking for that perfect wave.
2. The Ceilings
The height of the ceilings here is nothing short of astonishing. As soon as I arrived in my flat, I wandered from room to room in slack jawed amazement, gazing up and thinking “Was this city once populated by trampolining giants?” Then I was on the phone to my fellow comedians to brag. Ceiling envy can be intense, and exaggerations are commonplace. Last night in the Pleasance Courtyard, I heard a young comic trying to wow a BBC producer by claiming his ceilings were so high that he was able to pogo on his kitchen table. Unimpressed, she replied that she was holding regular fireworks nights in her toilet. He was devastated and she milled off to schmooze a sketch troupe.
3. Real Life Isn’t That Good
In Edinburgh I can forget about getting lifts with comedians to far flung corners of Britain to perform for ten minutes for £30, then being driven back by the same comedian and listening to him complain about the impossibility of breaking into TV before being dropped off at 2 in the morning somewhere on the North Circular. In Edinburgh, comedy stops feeling like an incredibly inconvenient evening class, and starts to feel like reality. Everyone is either a comedian or an audience. In real life there are lawyers and plumbers and IT Help Desk Support Managers. For the rest of the year these people make me feel like I’m wasting my life, that comedy isn’t a real job. They are right. But in Edinburgh, for a brief, wonderful month, I am the IT Help Desk Support Manager.
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Henry Paker performed in ‘The Comedy Zone’ at the Pleasance Cabaret Bar. See http://www.whatareyoulaughingat.co.uk for more information.
published: Oct-2008
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