Red Blooded Rogues

On the mean, cobbled streets of the Edinburgh Fringe, alpha males stick out, scorning the idea that it’s a poncey arts festival. From Joe Bone’s gruff detective Bane, to Humphrey Ker’s Nazi smasher commando Dymock Watson, or even Max and Ivan’s lycra-clad The Wrestling extravaganza, ‘mockismo’ character comedy snarls at metrosexual stand-up, sticks it in a headlock and piledrives it.

A gladiatorial arena where mighty titans, scurrilous rogues and unrepentant sex pests compete for the crowds, these happy few are humanity’s last remaining heroes and champions, evoking bygone eras when men were real men, even if played by actors still justifying their theatrical vocation to their dad.

So Victor Legit, Adam Riches’ take-no-shit, Federation Against Copyright Theft enforcement officer is back, wearing nothing but a towel and daring anyone to comment. For Riches, who’s built a swaggering reputation with a succession of swinging dick creations, new characters like Rex Monolith, Monster Hunter seem unlikely to slow his testosterone tsunami.

“I didn’t sit down to actively write masculine characters or flawed heroes,” he maintains. “But it’s what I’ve always found funny and it really helps in a performance, creating a show the audience will get a rush from, even if they’ve already seen four or five that day. I want my characters to have an exuberance and posture that can sweep an audience up, through confidence or arrogance and just keep that energy going. Once I’d settled on thiss tyle, there was a sense of pomposity that was comedically ripe to prick.”

Bring Me the Head of Adam Riches traces an epic quest, a series of “trials, tasks and challenges” in such far-flung locations as the Amazon and enigmatically packaged boardgames of the 1970s.

Similarly for Colin Hoult, whose Inferno completes a trilogy of shows on monsters, villains, and now heroes, it was Greek legends and Joseph Campbell’s seminal, Star Wars-inspiring book The Hero With A Thousand Faces that gave him the framework for his studies of damaged masculinity.

“That whole thing of the hero’s path, the dragon you have to slay, my characters all have that within them,” he explains. “But they’re hurt and unable tomove on”.

In times of austerity, people are traditionally drawn to superhero narratives as a form of escapism. This summer’sendless cycle of lycra-clad cinematic avengers affirms this, yet these overblown CGI spectacles have taken a hammering at the box office from riotous buddy comedies like Bridesmaids and The Hangover 2. Comedy has to reflect a compromised, cowed society and so has little truck with macho grandstanding or showboating, unless it’s unabashed nostalgia of course, which is why Riches’ cartoonish creations hark back to 80s action heroes rather than Jason Bourne, Pierce Brosnan’s wise-cracking Bond or Daniel Craig’s cold-eyed assassin. Hoult’s much-admired Zimbani was pure, safari-suited Roger Moore.

After the creepy Carnival of Monsters and malevolent Enemy of the World – “I dumped a lot of tragedy and pain in them” – Hoult conceived Inferno as a more straightforward celebration of macho heroism, to reflect “hope and to be filled with possibility”.

Yet cynicism crept into his writing and this final instalment is “going to end up very dark”, less about how men excel than “how we survive".

“The thing that blows my mind is that we can all still live together,” he explains. “Considering what arseholes we are, how brutal, nasty and vicious, that society endures is incredible. In all my shows, there’s a moment where a character talks about civil liberty because that’s something I find terrifying, that we’re only ever a few steps away from killing and eating each other.”

Even his standout creation, Thor, the God of Thunder is horribly diminished, being from Leeds and called Norman.

“He’s actually Twar, the God of Thwunder, but he can’t quite pronounce it,” Hoult explains. “He’s supposed to be like Daniel Kitson. But he’s not Daniel Kitson ... he’s just, um, a bit like Daniel Kitson.

“He’s basically a guy who’s been hanging outside Londis, he’s got a torch with a pen in it as his hammer and any sign of war on mankind, he’ll come to the rescue. He’s silly and big and a lot of the humour derives from questioning whether he’s actually Thor.”

Balancing a Norse god with characters that are “deliberately very small and still”, Hoult’s other creations had to be “heroes in more subtle ways, failed heroes or should-have-been-heroes and weren’t. Or the sort of people
society is meant to consider heroes but who are actually arseholes.”

Outdated conceits like ‘a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do’ get satirised by David O’Doherty in his one-man play Rory Sheridan’s Tales of the Antarctica. Growing up, the Dubliner’s idols were 1987 Tour De France winner Stephen Roche and Sir Ernest Shackleton. Sadly, after devouring the polar explorer’s diaries, he realised there were upsetting, mundane parallels with his Fringe career.

“When those guys came back from their expeditions, they often owed a lot of money, so they recouped it by doing a tour of the UK, talking about their expedition with slides,” he explains. “At the Royal Albert Hall in 1915, you weren’t listening to choral or pipe organ music as much as people talking about their search for the Nile.

“Yet you read how boring some of [Shackleton’s] journal accounts are, I don’t think he was being particularly heroic. It was heroic to go, but so much of what we’re told about him has been shrouded in the mists of mythology, a lot of it self-created so he could set up his next trip.”

By contrast, O’Doherty’s luckless Sheridan is a reluctant adventurer. Sucked into seafaring to impress a girl, becoming expedition leader by default, he gets saddled with debt and develops an abiding hatred of penguins.

“I really like the idea of someone giving this lecture because he has to. It’s a good way of making him honest about how awful it was,” O’Doherty suggests. “I’ve given Sheridan a more 2011 sensibility. He’s come back shell-shocked and wants to tell you what it’s like being stuck in the world’s most remote garden shed with idiots.

“If there’s an epic and mythological undertaking here, it’s that he’s a guy who due to a series of accidents, death and a sex change, ended up doing a job he wasn’t equipped to be doing. Yet he couldn’t let the facade drop. That’s something we can all relate to. He’s fucked off and the facade breaks down pretty quickly.”

In reality, Shackleton’s heroism lay in “making sure there wasn’t a mutiny when they were stuck on the ice” ventures O’Doherty.

“He made them do The Merchant of Venice, rationing out the booze but celebrating any possible celebration, solstice, birthdays or whatever.”

Yet if heroism is a performance for others, it still takes balls to beckon an audience behind all that posturing and willy-waving.

Nothing fazes Riches after breaking a leg at the 2008 Fringe and finishing his run on crutches. Yet he cheerfully likens his committed audience participation—which this year promises one lucky member an encounter with The Creature from the Black Lagoon—to “pulling a human torpedo into the show. You could scupper it completely if you can’t persuade them to go with it.”

This tussle of wills is something Hoult relishes too. “The thing I enjoy most is when you’re just making stuff up, talking really seriously as a character and they’re responding really seriously,” he says. “There’s a moment in your head where you realise, ‘this is ridiculous’. It’s like they’ve forgotten that five minutes ago you were a different bloke.”

Ultimately though, the comic has to sacrifice his ego, pride and acclaim in order to champion the hapless everyman.
“I generally have to involve a man,” Riches reflects. “It would be slightly uncomfortable seeing me bouncing off a woman, it would feel like bullying. I want to be able to push a guy and challenge him a little bit, develop a camaraderie with him.

“But I genuinely try to make sure he’s lauded at some point. So even though he’ll take a couple of knocks and acouple of digs, he’ll come through with a reward at the end, a kiss from a girl or a huge round of applause.”