The Stage

Russell Kane wins Edinburgh Comedy Award

Published Saturday 28 August 2010 at 20:42 by Thom Dibdin

Russell Kane finally triumphed at the Foster’s Edinburgh Comedy Awards on Saturday as his Smokescreens and Castles took Best Comedy Show.

It was a clean sweep for the Pleasance, with Roisin Conaty getting the Best Newcomer award for Hero, Warrior, Fireman, Liar, and bookie’s favourite for the main award, Bo Burnham, grabbing the Panel Prize for his show Words, Words, Words.

Kane is no stranger to the awards. He was nominated in the Best Newcomer category in 2006 and for the main award in 2008 and 2009. Speaking after the award ceremony he said he deliberately changed his format from previous years’ “shows of ideas”, in which he was showing off his “intellectual fireworks”.

“This year, I have looked at other comedians I really respect like Sarah Millican,” he said. “As well as having a brilliantly written show, their funniness is number one.

“This year is a funny show - a really basic device and no clever ideas. In my family home I go round room by room. Easy, you can bolt anything you like onto that. It turned into this really tragic metaphor for my dad.”

Besides being very funny, the show is also deeply personal, in a way which Kane refers to as an elegy for his father. So personal, that he didn’t include the ending in his preview performances, only adding it in for the first time in Edinburgh, because “I don’t know how many speakings of that I have in me”.

“It wasn’t cynically put in,” he says. “It was because I didn’t have an end and it was something I was ready to tell the audiences, that I have never told them before.”

Best Newcomer winner, Roisin Conaty, has been on the comedy circuit for some time, but Hero, Warrior, Fireman, Liar is her first solo show and her first full hour.

“The first week was quite tough,” she said. “The show had to find its feet because most sets that you do on the circuit or in clubs are 20 to 30 minutes. It is completely different. You have more time to express ideas, that is quite lovely. I really enjoyed the month, I learned so much. Edinburgh is such a learning curve.”

Announcing the Panel Prize, Stephen Armstrong, chair of the Foster’s Edinburgh Comedy Award 2010, spoke of the the way that modern media has changed comedy. Bo Burnham’s Words, Words, Words is, he said, “utterly in the spirit of the fringe,” and is “proof that online sensations with millions of fans will still flock to these cramped streets, boiling venues and terrible food.”

Speaking after the award, Burnham added that he is hugely flattered to get the prize.

“I wanted so badly to be a part of this fringe. I don’t feel like it is a consolation prize,” said the American who turned 20 last week. “The fringe was way more than I expected it to be. I was worried about coming here and not knowing anybody. But I wasn’t like an outsider, which was nice.”

In a separate development, Burnham won the inaugural Malcolm Hardee “Act most likely to make a million quid” Award. Controversially, Burnham’s London PR company had initially distanced the comedian from the nomination without consulting him.

“That was a confusion,” Burnham told The Stage diplomatically, adding that as a huge Malcolm Hardee fan he found it funny if the award wanted to make fun of him. “I am huge fan of antiestablishment, anti-comedy sort of stuff. I went down and accepted it last night and it was really funny.”

The Malcolm Hardee Awards are presented every year at the Edinburgh Fringe until 2017 in memory of the late “godfather of British alternative comedy”, a man with an eye for talent and pranks who drowned in 2005. The main Malcolm Hardee Award for Comic Originality went to Robert White for his enthusiastic unconventionality.

The Malcolm Hardee Cunning Stunt Award for best Fringe publicity stunt went to Stewart Lee for the way his complaints about the Foster’s Comedy Award search for a “Comedy God”, led to the Frank Chickens returning to the Fringe with a show that promoted Lee’s own product.