AT last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, Carl Donnelly was performing stand-up on the top deck of a bus.
Luckily it was for a paying audience at the unique Blundabus venue at Potterrow, rather than some bamboozled commuters.
In his show The Nutter On The Bus, the 36-year-old recounted tales of experiences with hallucinogenic Peruvian tea and converting to veganism.
This year, in another venue-themed show, he’ll be foxtrotting onto a grander stage at the Counting House Ballroom for free show Strictly Carl Donnelly.
Edinburgh fringe-goers! I’ll be back at this year’s @edfringe with my tenth solo show (in a row). It’s an hour of comedy that is not only very funny but also free. I thought what better way to celebrate a decade in he game than to open it up to all as part of @freefringefest pic.twitter.com/hNyPKHNvaq
— Carl Donnelly (@CarlDonnelly) July 14, 2018
Speaking to The Sunday Post just hours after returning from a stag do for fellow comedian Kai Humphries – and experiencing ‘a whole new world of pain’ – he says he’s looking forward to a landmark show this year.
It’s the London-born comic’s tenth Fringe outing, and he reckons comedians don’t make enough of how many shows they’ve done, in comparison to bands that always emphasise how many years they’ve been on the go, or how many albums they’ve released.
He says: “I think comedians are maybe too self-deprecating, we don’t want to try and big up the fact we’ve put a lot of work in over the years.
“The trick to comedy is to make it look as easy as possible but sometimes it’s nice to point out that actually a lot of work does go into it.”
Over the course of the ten years Carl has been performing at the Fringe, he’s seen a lot of changes as the festival continues to expand and grow.
With splinter movements and the likes of the free Fringe, there are now more acts than ever out there for visitors to the capital this summer.
“I think comedians have got a lot more professional, and sometimes a bit too professional,” he adds.
“When I went up to do my first solo show in 2009, me and my generation of people we just went up and did a group show and then the year after we did our debut show.
“Now I think newcomers basically wait a few years to do their first show so they’re more experienced because of how competitive it is.
“They take it a lot more seriously whereas we just wanted to do our shows.”
As much as the Fringe has gotten more professional, in Carl’s view, there are still plenty of ways to innovate and mix things up.
He’s doing just that by not only performing his stand-up show, but making late night bus journeys… to the beyond.
He’ll be returning to the Blundabus venue to contact the dead – even though tapping into Edinburgh’s spooky side was never really meant to be a serious idea.
“I loved playing the bus and Bob Slayer [the venue organiser] offered me this midnight slot and I jokingly said we should do some late night drunken seances!
“Most promoters would say no but Bob is mad. He said it sounded like fun and before I knew it he’d registered it with the Fringe.
“I was in Australia, in a different time zone and he sent me a link to it on the Fringe site. It was a joke idea to begin with, but it’s quite fun to almost be forced into doing a Fringe show.
“I’ve got a friend who used to do ghost tours so I’ll try to get them involved. As much as it’ll be drunk stupidity it would also be good to get us all a bit scared as well.”
Carl’s award-winning comedy career has seen him gig all over the world, and he regularly appears on TV on the likes of Mock The Week and Stand Up For The Week.
But he had very little stand-up knowledge when he started out, beyond growing up watching Eddie Murphy’s Delirious and “laughing at how rude it was”.
A visit to a comedy club at 21 after he’d dropped out of uni and found himself working in a job he didn’t like put him onto the path that has now led to his tenth Fringe.
“For some reason I just watched this gig and couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” Carl recounts. “It looked so fun, it was amazing seeing one person on stage just mess around.
“It set off a little flame, which I probably tried to ignore for a while, but then felt I had to try it.”
Looking back on his decade of Fringe performances, he says there are so many high points, but for a few years there have been some lows as well.
“Getting nominated for the main award a few years back was quite nice,” he admits. “That year in particular I’d had such a bad year personally, I was going through such a bad time and my show was all over the shop.
“It was different every night basically because I was in the midst of a psychotic episode. I was drunk almost the whole month. I’d just broken up with my wife a month before the Fringe, I was basically off the rails.”
While that could have been a recipe for disaster, Carl reckons the show ended up “weirdly getting good” due to his “crazy state of mind”.
And far from being a complete write-off, on the last week he was nominated for the main festival award.
“I couldn’t believe that I’d managed to do that in that state, it was such a surprise. I know some comics ask their agents who’s coming in to watch them, any reviewers or judges. I don’t ask, I never like to know who’s in even afterwards, so I’d no idea I’d even had any of the judges in over the month. It was a total shock.”
Like many of his fellow comedians, Carl will be fully immersed in the Fringe experience, checking out other shows as well as performing every day for a different audience.
“I love a bit of theatre, if you’d have said that to me ten years ago I’d have laughed at you,” He says.
“Over the years I’ve come to appreciate the Fringe. Especially as a comic, you see comedy all around and you can see things that you can’t do yourself.
“I try to see a lot of stand up – there’s always stuff that really catches you off guard. I went to see Hannah Gadsby’s show last year, which went on to win the main award, and that was something that I wouldn’t have got to see the rest of the year. I love it.”
Carl Donnelly performs Strictly Carl Donnelly! at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe at The Counting House Ballroom from 2nd – 26th August at 6:45pm. More info and tickets are available at www.carldonnelly.co.uk
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