comedy feature
3 Good Reasons: Nat Luurtsema
Comedy Zone’s Nat Luurtsema on the three best things about giving up a month of your life to perform at the Edinburgh Festival.
1. A Fringe Body like Mr Tumnus
The Fringe pushes my body and mind into survival mode. I pickle it, I don’t let it sleep and I make it talk to strangers. It hates this and the only way to cheer it up is with junk food and fags. Lunch today was Wotsits and Maltesers, then a cigarette. Essentially just air. Cheesy air for starters, honeycombed air for mains, and dirty air for pudding. From the waist up I’m enfeebled; I couldn’t wrestle a thick porridge. But conversely, this hilly city is making my legs unnervingly strong. I have become a cut n’ shut hybrid creature - powering uphill on robust goaty hindquarters, with my listless torso trailing behind. I think I fainted walking home last night, but the legs just kept going while the rest of me snoozed.
2. A Usefully Calcifying Heart
A particularly brutal Saturday night crowd ‘featured’ a couple of drunks who whispered back every word I said on stage. This is cunning as only I could hear, and any retaliation would’ve seemed inexplicable to everyone else. It’s a very unnerving experience, I felt like a Sign Zone programme for the deaf, one with a sign language translator at the bottom of the screen, except mine had gone evil and turned on me. This is all very useful though, I want to return home impervious to hurt feelings, like a pro. Or a simpleton.
3. Survival Skills that would shame a cockroach
The Fringe is a time of valuable self-realisation. Turns out I adore battered haggis, to the point of happily nibbling on last night’s when I awake cradling its remnants. Sadly my joy is solitary. My new boyfriend watches my scavenging with sad eyes that say “I didn’t realise a life with you would be so haggissy”. No, well me neither. Life’s rich tapestry and all that. God, I’d be good in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, I mused as I nibbled. I’m admirably rat-like. Others will stagger anguished amidst the smoking rubble, I’ll be cheerfully poking through it with a knife and fork.
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Nat Luurtsema 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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