Kern’s Corner: Why decent people must boycott the Edinburgh Festival

The biggest arts festival in the world begins today and it’s really shit. If you’re the kind of person who likes “doing things” then you might enjoy it. But for sane people who are happy doing nothing – but who could be guilted into thinking you have to do things in life – here’s why you shouldn’t go to the Edinburgh festival.

Let’s start with the theatre.

There’s theatre at Edinburgh but theatre is stupid and it makes no sense to go and see a load of ponces talking bollocks on a stage when you can stay at home watching TV, eating crisps and pause what you’re watching to go for a shit if you need to. Name any Shakespeare play and I’ll summarise it for you:

HAMLET?
A load of mugs talking crap and dicking about

THE TEMPEST?
Some ponces talk shit for a bit

TIMON OF ATHENS?
Some agoraphobic dick cries for a bit and other prats dance

GHOSTBUSTERS?
Some pricks chase ghosts and then chat crap

So there’s no need to go and watch any theatre in Edinburgh cos that’s all there is – that and maybe some crap about the miners strike, or Tony Blair or a Yorkshire-based, glam-rock, gender-queer teen from the 80’s forming a pen pal relationship with someone from Hamas who blows themselves up in a suicide bomb that kills thirty civilians on the same day she gets home from winning a school dance competition about her overbearing dad. Obviously this sort of stuff is complete bollocks and God knows what kind of world the people who think that’s enjoyable or art believe in. The kind of people who’ve never eaten at Chicken Cottage or had to crap into a Pringles packet I imagine.

Similarly I know there’s also some art crap up in Edinburgh too so if you want to see someone who’s sellotaped a pencil to a steak or has a stuffed squirrel with a courgette up it’s arse then maybe go and see some of this shit.

There’s also books and crap so if you like being around the kind of pricks who go to wanky art-cinema cafes and drink shit cappuccinos with a slice of crap carrot cake – knock yourself out.

Seriously – who the fuck enjoys that world? Who are these people? Then there are fucking jugglers and all that street theatre bollocks that people who wear blacks t-shirts and trousers do. Pricks on unicycles. Pricks with a spinning thing they lob in the air. Pricks making a big circle form round them so that prick tourists can watch the prick balance a stick on their nose so they can
afford their plane ticket back to Spain or Italy or wherever the fuck they’re desperate to get back to – anywhere but the pigeon-shit infested streets of the UK’s biggest arts festival balancing a stick on their nose.

Comedy wise you got a huge selection – all of it shit – so pick whichever crap
takes your fancy.

You got crap comics from the telly, crap comics who used to be on telly, crap comics who want to be on telly, crap comics who can’t even afford a telly, crap comics talking about their ethnicity, crap comics talking about their gender, crap comics talking about their sexuality, crap comics talking about Brexit, crap comics talking about the Tories, crap comics talking about their vaginas, crap comics talking about how they’re single, crap comics talking about how they’re nearly forty, crap comics who think they do weird stuff, crap poem comedians, crap prop comedians, crap character comedians, crap double acts, crap improv groups, crap sketch acts – a whole range of mentally ill people who’ve spent thousands of pounds going up to Edinburgh to degrade themselves in front of
strangers rather than going on holiday.

So you got loads of stuff to be bored by if you go up to Edinburgh.

But above all, the worst thing in Edinburgh by far are the drama students who pretend to be dead on the street whilst holding up fliers for people to take. This has been going on so long the first student to have ever done it is now actually dead.

He was eighty-two.

He died after being trodden on by a comedienne doing a show about how we have to stop fat-shaming.

Honestly – the Edinburgh festival is awful and I thoroughly recommend you don’t go.

Seriously, the money you’d spend going up there – think how many Chinese takeaways that could get you? And think what you could be doing with your time instead?

Anyway, best of luck to all the acts performing.

Oh – and here’s something for the acts going up to think about – I once saw a drunken agent in a town square, pissing on a poster of one of their clients. Have a think about that.

LEE KERN
Lee is a writer and comedian.

You can follow him on Facebook

Read last week’s column about Islam and chips.

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