Beast of burden

“As I get older, I’m more interested in talking about the things that matter, the things that are really important,” Bridget Christie insists. Opening her eighth Edinburgh Fringe show in a donkey costume, she couldn’t be more serious about stubbornly making an ass of herself.

Unlikely perspectives have become her metier, through what she mockingly describes as her “trademark Bridget Christie Lens of the Absurd™." Having performed as a frustrated ant comedian, Charles II and Japanese knotweed among others, she appreciates that "people see me as silly. But there’s always a point to it.”

A sometime biker and goth who reckons her comedy is “completely straightforward and normal,” she will concede that she’s invariably the “weirdo” act on a typical club bill. Regardless, Christie has just recorded a set for Comedy Central’s The Alternative Comedy Experience and is busier than ever.

“The mainstreaming of comedy has been absolutely brilliant” she reflects. “Lots of acts were finding it hard to get booked but now there are gigs springing up all over the place. Political gigs, alternative gigs, a really broad circuit’s emerged.

“Alternative stuff hasn’t been in for the past four or five years but it’s coming back now. You just have to do what you do and wait for it to come back into fashion. In every town there are the goth kids and the ones that don’t quite fit in. If someone had come to Gloucester when I was 15 and done something leftfield that I wasn’t expecting, I’d have been delighted.”

For this year’s festival, the 40-year-old mother-of-two is championing overlooked beasts of burden, specifically donkeys and women. She’s passionate about both, explaining that “donkey milk is the closest thing to breast milk you can get. It was used as an alternative in this country till the nineteenth century.”

Appearing as A Ant in 2010, a resentful ant stand-up struggling to reconcile a minority comic’s desire to be heard while confounding expectations and prejudice, she kept the laughs subtextual, an in-joke for Edinburgh’s “comedy savvy” crowds. War Donkey, by comparison, is relatively straightforward in tackling women’s issues.

“Some of the newer female comics have told me that they used to come and see me because I never talked about gender” she recalls. “And that it was good to hear a woman discussing things that weren’t about women. I know you can get branded a bit but that’s ridiculous. I don’t see why women can’t do women’s stuff.”

Although never as frank and outspoken as say, Greg Proops, in denouncing a modern “war on women”, she’s preoccupied by female genital mutilation in developing countries, the suppressed rights of Afghan women and the myth of hyper perfectionism in Western society, revealing that’s she trying to get an antenatal unit built in Bo, Sierra Leone. None of which will feature explicitly in her hour though, because “it’s too grim and there’s a delicate balance between preaching and remembering that what you’re doing is meant to be comedy. I try and come at it from a different perspective.”

Taking her lead from the Suffragettes, she’s zeroing in on a single issue for most of the show, principally “MPs branding themselves as new Tory feminists.

“Theresa May, Nadine Dorries and Louise Mensch, supposedly bringing feminism out of the gutter? I’m trying to work out who they are and what they mean by that? When women are worse off than they’ve been in the last 20 years, when this government is making this the worst time to be a woman.”

You pick your battles. Rather than hurling herself in front of a horse, Christie is throwing her lot in with donkeys, inhabiting the persona of, and indeed becoming, Jason the War Donkey. The show was inspired by Colonel Gaddafi publicly denouncing the steady, dependable animals, after they delivered ammunition to rebel fighters in the Libyan town of Gharyan.

Donkeys’ wartime contribution and sacrifices are always overlooked in favour of the more romantic horse, she argues, expressing revulsion at the Palestinian practice of strapping explosives to the quadrupeds, turning them into unwitting suicide bombers. In every performance, she’ll be offering audience members £10 to donate towards a sanctuary in the Middle East.

In recent times, historians have been re-examining the once prevailing view of infantry slaughter in World War I, as simply that of “lions led by donkeys”. And Christie is keen to avoid any unpleasant, online “horse-donkey argument”, any equine turf tension in comedy chat forums.

“But you know, Jesus didn’t ride a horse into Jerusalem. That’s just high status and confrontational. It says you’re riding into battle. Horses are upper-class, with these glamorous movies made about their lives. And the humble donkey remains the downtrodden working-class.”