Stand and Deliver!

 

“You know what I looked up today?” John Robertson asks down the phone line, joy in his voice as he adds, “this is fun!” What he’s looked up today – and I’m not sure whether he knew what he was looking for, or if he stumbled upon it – is a Wikipedia article about a serial killer. “It’s a guy called ‘The Servant Girl Annihilator’, which is now my favourite serial killer name ever.”

Okay, don’t get the wrong idea. John does appear a little too happy to discover the existence of The Servant Girl Annihilator, revelling in the description of America’s first documented serial killer who slightly predates Jack the Ripper and whom some believe was in fact one and the same homicidal maniac as Jack. But John Robertson, a fine comic who has been doing stand-up some seven years, is currently touring a show that happens to be called A Nifty History of Evil – which one promoter has astutely summed up as “the comedy of your nightmares; a manic journey through history’s biggest  bastards, with the icky bits left in!’ With that kind of description, you not only already know you’re gonna like the show, you also know that ‘The Servant Girl Annihilator’ is likely to inspire more material. And if you do like the show already, you should also know that you’re in good company: A Nifty History of Evil recently won ‘Artists’ Choice’ and ‘Critics’ Choice’ awards at Perth’s recent Wild West Comedy Festival. So you can understand the comic’s joy at discovering that such a thing as ‘The Servant Girl Annihilator’ exists.

“My favourite element,” John says of the Wikipedia entry, “is that centuries later, some anonymous dickhead is attempting to claim, for the glory of America, that they had serial killers before Britain; there’s a more obscure and less lauded serial killer more worthy of attention.” John likens it to the story of Jim Shepherd, publisher of superhero comic book The Phantom, having once written to Bob Kane, creator of Batman, and accuse him of being a hack for stealing Lee Falk’s work and Ray Moore’s character design – since the Dark Knight is clearly the Ghost Who Walks, Man Who Cannot Die with ears and a cape…

The reference is a little obscure, even for me, but it sums up the essence of John Robertson: extreme knowledge of precise minutiae, delivered entertainingly. It’s part of what makes this Perth comic such an interesting proposition.

Acting funny

On first blush, John’s clearly an actor turned comic. Not because, like most actors-turned-comic, he declaims his routine on stage like a well-rehearsed script; no, he’s one of the good ones. But you guess he’s an actor because everything John says off stage could well be dialogue perfectly scripted for the character he happens to be in real life. Or, to be more accurate, the character he happens to be, in larger-than-real-life.

As a comic – and indeed, as a frequent host of sci-fi conventions – he keeps an audience equally spell-bound with hand puppets and ukulele-accompanied songs as he does purely with words. But before you even get to that point of the on-stage – or off-stage – performance, you might be struck, as others have, by John’s resemblance to other people. Like Melbourne comic Danny McGinlay, for example.

“Oh, that’s nice,” John says. “You can mistake me for Danny McGinlay if I was a foot-and-a-half taller, and his voice was three feet deeper…”

Actually, if you knew either of them well, you wouldn’t mistake one for the other… unless you were dealing with them over the phone – since John’s voice isn’t three feet deeper than Danny’s. There’s probably only a couple of inches difference and it’s hard to call who’s actually ahead. However, if Danny’s sideburns were a couple of feet broader, you would have trouble telling them apart. John’s sideburns are, after all, part of the source of the other comparison he frequently receives, to Wolverine of the Uncanny X-Men. “Yeah, if Danny had sideburns that stretched from here to the Tasman Sea… although our shoulders are reasonably the same breadth…”

It’s hard to tell if John is merely doing the comedian’s thing – taking an idea that’s been offered and running with it, turning it around to look at it from various angles, to see which bits of it catch the light and so can reflect a new twist leading to new humour – or merely running through thoughts that he’s toyed with previously.

“I’ve only met Danny once, actually,” John continues. “It was like, ‘Aha…! Two years ago someone told me I was a little like you, and now that I’ve met you, I wish I were. Because you’re quite handsome, you devil-may-care devil…’”

I doubt they were John’s exact words to Danny, even if they had actually met. But Robertson insists they’re certainly his sentiments. “With his well-developed chest, and me at five-foot-eight and slightly overweight, I’m so glad people think I look like him!”

John also accepts the allegation that he “can’t not have been an actor before he was a comic”, adding the proviso that “it doesn’t mean I was a good actor”. Rather, he says, as a stage actor he found the “artifice” of live performance to be “absolutely ridiculous”:

“A comedian will walk out onto a stage – which is an area purpose-built so that a large group of people can look at you – and will look back at the crowd and talk directly to them. Whereas an actor has to go through this ridiculous contrivance of pretending that somehow the audience isn’t there, while at the same time talking to someone who’s next to them in a highly intimate manner – and by ‘highly intimate’, I mean, they’re standing at an angle and in fact yelling at the top of their voice, so all the people that they can’t see because they aren’t there, can actually hear them.”

Clearly, stage acting had to be jettisoned for comedy – John’s ability to see the absurdity in life wouldn’t allow him to actually live that absurdity daily without being able to call it, as a way of life. “I’m too logical to be an actor. I like the idea of, I walk out, I look directly at you, and I communicate directly to you. And if you like what you hear, you let me know immediately.” That arrangement works best for John, he insists, because he’s “an impatient, ‘only child’ sort of a chap” who likes his feedback directly.

Playing himself

John doesn’t quite engage with the suggestion that he’s ‘playing himself’ larger than life off-stage, although he agrees that he does “adapt” who he’s going to be, depending on what he thinks of the crowd. I reckon it’s as true of the people he’s with off stage, but I know he’s speaking particularly of audiences. “You can tell how high I think a crowd’s IQ is – or to be fairer, how drunk I think a crowd is – by whether or not I roll up my sleeves before I go on stage”. 

According to John, rolled up sleeves means “g’day, I’m your everyman! I’ve just finished doing some heavy physical labour, and here I am now, to communicate to you”. With his sleeves down, John just looks like “a reasonably well-dressed boy”. It’s the difference, he says, between giving a ‘happy-and-fun’ audience happiness and fun, and a rowdy, aggressive audience, some aggression. As we’re discussing this over the phone, I can’t tell if I’m chatting to the reasonably well-dressed boy or the physical everyman, but I remind John of one such gig where he had to roll the sleeves up; he talks about it on stage: a horror gig before an audience of pissed-up Yorkshiremen.

“There’s a whole subset of comedians from my town who were there that night,” John recalls. He relates the story in a tone that almost sounds like warm nostalgia – and it may well be, now that time has passed. “Everyone has a war story from that evening.”

The story goes, a “lovely” Perth promoter – a luv-er-ly cockney lad who used to book the comics for club gigs and corporate gigs, and whom John ‘does’ in character when telling the story, phone the comic up with the offer of a “lovely, lovely” gig to a “lovely, lovely young crowd”, replacing the original MC who had dropped out. The ‘young crowd’ happened to be an audience of 80-year-olds at a golf club.

“They were all old Yorkshiremen and women who had been members of the club since they emigrated to Australia 20 years before. Every comedian on the bill was 40 to 60 years younger than them and they hated us.” 

Rest assured, the gig commenced as normal, with both sides trying to make the most of a bad situation. They respectfully sat through John’s opening slot, despite not really ‘getting’ him; they tolerated the first act. But the second act was an American, at which point, John says, “they lost their shit”. A guy up the back yelled out, “Ah don’t lahk yanks!” It was followed by 20 minutes of “deathly silence and Yorkshire grumbling”.

Another comic – whom John describes as “basically like an Umbilical Brother” – got up and did sound effects, and while the agéd Yorkshirefolk didn’t like him either, they eventually applauded him out of respect “for the sweat he produced”. 

It was during the interval, while John was taking a leak, that revelation came. “I heard a large voice behind me say, ‘Oh, aye, a comedian. Ah lahk you. Some of your jokes are funny. You know who Ah lahk? Ah lahk that Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown.’” It was at that moment, John says, that he realised they’d been booked for the wrong gig. “At the time, none of us were punchline merchants. We are now. That’s what we learnt that evening: ‘Whattaya know? We should write some jokes. People like those!’”

True enough, although the extent of damage wrought by lack of punchlines was yet to be unveiled. Somewhere during the night an old-school open mic-er got up and delivered sub-book gag routines like “…She asked me to kiss her somewhere dirty, so I took her to Battersea Power Station…” which went down a treat. So when the headliner, who was meant to do a fifty minute set, told an internet joke, which the agéd Yorkshirefolk loved, followed by another internet joke, which they also loved, and then promptly ran out of material agéd Yorkshirefolk like, things were bound to come unstuck.

“I can’t tell you his name,” John says of the headline act that night, “because I’m certain he doesn’t want to remember this. But he said, ‘I’m out of internet jokes; wouldn’t you people rather be asleep? Or dead?’”

And that’s when the crowd – on the verge of hostility all night – finally cracked: four minutes into a 50-minute set. He said, ‘Are we all tired of stand-up?’ and they said ‘Yes!’ and started booing.” The audience booed the headline act offstage, and then started chanting for the old-school open mic-er to return. So John got back up, thanked everyone for coming while the booing and the chanting continued, and then all the comedians fled from the venue, fearing for their lives. “And three of us pissed on the side of the building,” John adds. “That’s how aggrieved we were. And off we went.”

John recalls that he happened to be sitting next to the promoter’s daughter while the headline comic was busy asking the audience whether they wouldn’t “rather be watching Gardening Australia? Or Matlock? Or just rotting in the ground?”, and she turned to John, demanding, “What is wrong with him?” According to John, “there was nothing to say. It was an age war. And we lost. We were the Germans in this encounter. It was Perth comedy’s Gallipoli: an Englishman sent us to the wrong beach.”

Close-knit fraternity community

The metaphor of warfare – a battle waged between the comics on one side and… well, and everyone else on the other – is telling. Perth comics are a closely bonded tribe, particularly evident when they’re interstate.

“This was one of the incidents that cemented the brotherhood,” John insists, before getting sidetracked by trying to correct ‘brotherhood’ with ‘fraternity’ and realising that ‘fraternity’, like ‘brotherhood’, appears to overlook the female Perth comics. “This is one of the problems with the English language”, he says, hoping to opt for ‘community’ but deciding against it since ‘fraternity’ at least implies ‘family’ whereas ‘community’, he argues, “could be anything”.

“Yes, you are a close-knit family,” I agree, “but don’t change the subject. I want you to talk about it.”

“Yeah, let’s do it!” John insists. What I want is the story of how the Perth comedy circuit built itself up from nothing; how it is comedian-based, since they set up and run the rooms as a collective and – Shock! Horror! – everyone gets paid. Instead, John wants to concentrate on “that incident” that took place a few years ago at the Yorkshirefolk golf club. “We were all younger then,” he reminisces – as though he’s the one who’s hit the other side of 80 having died in two World Wars. When I point this out, he cites his own old age and physical decrepitude: “I’m 25 now, and my thighs are going”; having just hosted a scifi convention in Sydney, his body is “absolutely covered” in bruises, the provenance of which he cannot trace; his legs ache. “I’ve no idea what I did,” he says.

“You need to regenerate,” I offer. Lame as the Dr Who reference is, it’s the best I can offer. Like a properly trained out-of-work actor who plays a lot of theatresports, John knows better than to turn down the ‘offer’: “I think I will,” he says, “but the adamantium in my system is corrupting my body.”

Ah, a Wolverine reference. How apt.

“I was so delighted to find that out: the only reason Wolverine is not immortal is because of the adamantium in his body. There you go. There’s a fact.”

John receives comparisons to Wolverine far more than he does to Danny McGinlay. But, I point out, it is Wolverine whom Robertson resembles; not Hugh Jackman, who played the character on the big screen.

“Hugh Jackman is from my town,” John says. “We’d all like to look a little more like Hugh Jackman.” At this point, he realises the interview has mostly made him sound “particularly ugly”. But that’s down to John; it’s come out in his answers, not in my questions.

 â€œAh well, you see, that’s humility,” John replies. “If I were to be fair to my own self-image, I’d have to say that Hugh Jackman styled that look on me. I am a tremendously attractive deep-voiced soul, all 5-foot-8 of me. I have the build of a rugby player who doesn’t play rugby anymore.”

“Yes,” I add, in a downright un-Australian and cheeky manner, “but you just haven’t had your ‘alleged’ marriage of convenience yet.”

I regret the cheap and nasty Perez-Hiltonesque remark before it’s even finished coming out of my mouth, but John – ever the gracious professional – keeps moving in a different direction. “I can’t imagine a convenient marriage,” he counters. “I had a look at the two men from whom we get the term ‘sado-masochism’, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and the Marquis de Sade, and both of them had some good ideas, just that they were really shit at using them.”

According to John, “all Leopold wanted” was for his girlfriend to sleep with other people, but she was reluctant. “It was illegal at the time, and she would probably be shot, so he had a nervous breakdown”. Meanwhile, all the Marquis de Sade wanted, apparently, was to have orgies, but “he was such a dickhead about it that he kept telling everyone that he was doing it, which was unheard of at the time, so he kept going to prison”. John’s conclusion? “I should find some nice bohemian combination of the two, and then never mention it to anyone, ever.”

I know it looks as though John’s taken the opportunity to chase down another tangent in order to side-step discussing the nature of Perth comedy, but what he’s actually done is deftly led us back to the topic of show he’s doing, A Nifty History of Evil. Still, in the process, it does look as though he’s having a much better conversation with himself than with me.

“That’s what comes of being an only child,” John counters: “a need to respond to a simple question with a nine-part answer, none of which parts are inter-connected”. Indeed, he concludes, “I’m the Old Testament version of my own life story”. 

 

Raymond and Cat Cat

There is the tinge of the Old Testament to John’s life just at the moment, an example of the Good Lord who giveth, taking away. A key point of his performances has been the appearance of two adorable puppets – a sad guinea pig and a hideous cat. “I don’t know what it is about them,” he says, “but audiences find Raymond the Manic-Depressive Guinea Pig and Cat Cat the Munt-Faced Cat utterly enchanting.” 

Turns out John found Raymond on the floor of the children’s entertainment centre where he used to work. “He just looked so miserable and so desperately sad that I took him home. I literally stole him.” John used to walk around the place with the guinea pig on his hand, speaking with in its voice all day. “I absolutely loved the idea of a sad hamster. It was just so much fun. You could make it look like he was cutting his wrists; he could cover his eyes; it was just this great moment of pathos. It could make an audience so sad.…”

How sad? The way Raymond was first incorporated into the act was, John says, in the middle of a stand-up performance where all of the various lines, jokes and act-outs worked, and everyone was having so much of a “generally crazy time” that he decided to take the gamble and ask the audience if they’d like to see the puppets. The drunken audience loved the idea. So John pulled out Raymond the Manic-Depressive Guinea Pig and made him start talking and covering his eyes. The crowd was utterly hushed, until a man broke the silence by shouting, with tears in his voice, “Make us laugh! Make us laugh!”

“It was a nice moment,” John says. “That was Raymond sealing his part of the deal: girls would squeal in delight when Raymond came out, and then they would be moved with intense sadness. This is something I think we could do more of.”

You don’t need to do more of it if you can do it well. The moment of sadness in a comedy show – if done properly by someone who knows what he’s doing, is magical. It makes the release of the funny, when it returns, even funnier, because there’s been some patently ‘not funny’ (but no less powerful) to compare it to. After all, if everything was uniformly hilarious, how would you know? And it’s worth noting, Aussie comics do pathos very, very well. Consider Grahame Bond and Rory O’Donohue’s ‘singing tramp’ characters Neil and Errol on Aunty Jack, or Paul Hogan’s wino…

“It’s true,” John agrees, “and we handle it well, too. But we treat it like a foreign concept whenever it appears.” So much so, that it only works if the performer is totally committed to it. In fact, he adds, the lesson he’s learnt is that, with everything you do, “you have to really commit to it, or it doesn’t work. That seems to be the secret to the universe.”

Having reached the point where Raymond had more-or-less reduced an audience to tears, he’d pull out Cat Cat the Munt-Faced Cat, another item purloined from that place of work. “He’d been touched and played with by some 40,000 school children, so this once beautiful cat had been rendered almost black with dirt; his face was pushed in; his eyes were just blazing and sinister.”

Before an audience wracked by sadness, the repulsive cat did the business. “Cat Cat could scrunch his upper lip into his lower lip and then flap out his mouth, whereupon he would speak like Jabba the Hutt: ‘Waka jawaka, Solo. Bring the Wookie to me. Waka jawaka jawaka.’ The release in the room would be amazing every time.”

I have experienced this firsthand, but what didn’t quite twig that time – and I’ve no idea how or why I missed it – is that Cat Cat spoke like Jabba the Hutt. The Han Solo reference should have been a give-away.

“I don’t think anyone remembers it. That’s the nice thing about puppets: they get a biological response. Who gives a crap what the puppet is saying, providing it’s moving, and looks funny?”

John has used these puppets, he says, in places where it should almost be unreasonable to use them. There’s a YouTube clip of him entertaining a 1,200-strong anime convention with a kid’s story featuring Raymond and Cat Cat in prominent roles. “They lose their shit,” John says. “A little girl yells out, ‘everybody loves Raymond…’ They love it.” He also pulled Raymond and Cat Cat out while doing the support slot for Wayne Brady. “That was 2,500 people. And I learnt something that day – visual jokes don’t carry to the back of the room!” Three tiers of people laughed while the fourth tier – who had been making a lot of noise up to that point – fell silent. John knew it was time to put the puppets away and pull out the ukulele.

Unfortunately, John lost Raymond and Cat Cat during the most recent Melbourne International Comedy Festival, on the way to a sci-fi convention. “I hadn’t pulled them out for the whole festival because they’re not part of this year’s show,” he says. “I was taking them to the sci-fi convention I was hosting. I got off the tram and realised I’d left them on it.” John ran through traffic to catch up to the tram, but couldn’t reach it. He jumped onto the next tram, and had that diver contact the driver ahead, but to no avail. “By the time the driver on the first tram looked, they were gone. I rang my girlfriend and we wept. It was like losing some kids. Except that now, it’s months later, and it’s like losing some kids we didn’t really care about. I loved those guys, but I don’t burst out crying. Anymore.”

Well-meaning friends have sent John replacement puppets, but they know they’re not the same. The new kitten puppet is far too adorable. Even though it can be very funny when you “make it a Nazi and give it the voice of Christoph Waltz, from Inglorious Basterds”. Indeed, John says, it’s amazing how many puppets can do the Nazi salute. “It’s one of the first things people do when they grab them. ‘Can I make it touch its dick? Can I make it do a Nazi salute?’” Those things are hilariously funny, clearly, but it’s the pathos that the other puppets presented, that made John’s onstage shtick what it was. “I like my pathos,” he explains. “I like my animals weird and munted.”

Better acting as a musician

The puppets may be gone, but John still has his ukulele, which, like the puppets, doesn’t exist for what it is, so much, as for what it isn’t. “It’s not even there, necessarily, to be a musical thing,” John insists. “It’s just a point of difference. ‘Look, I’ve just done however minutes of high-energy stuff on stage, maybe we’ve gone a few places, maybe we’ve done some weird shit, maybe I’ve yelled a whole bunch of jokes at you; now let’s see what I can do with this happy instrument.’”

What John usually does with the ‘happy instrument’ is perform three songs, two of which “appear” to be “very happy” – although, when you listen, he points out, “neither of them are” – and the other one, really depressing. The ‘depressing song’ is mostly conveyed through John’s facial expressions. He finds the “face work” to be liberating. “Playing a slow, sad song where you don’t sing and all you do is look out into a large crowd as if you are dying on the inside is one of the most enjoyable things you can imagine,” he insists.

“But a lot of the time you can’t see the crowd,” I offer.

“I can,” John argues. And in a way, he can. Because “it isn’t about ‘seeing’ the crowd; it’s about ‘hearing’ them. If you’ve got a really large crowd and you walk across a stage looking incredibly sad and you’re singing a song that is amazingly pathetic, and you’re looking out at people, it’s amazing to hear a ripple of response go through them.” And, he reiterates, “having it carry through the entire room as you walk the length of the stage is a really gorgeous thing. It also makes you think ‘Christ I must look sad! I’m a better actor than I thought!’”

Nifty history of the show

We’re almost back to the point where we began: John Robertson, the actor-turned-comic – except that we actually began with John’s infatuation with serial killers and evil, which he’s turned into a live show, A Nifty History of Evil. I quite like the poster graphic – John as a cross between the Nosferatu vampire (from the film of the same name) and that character Ron Moody played – or rather, that character Noel Fielding of the Mighty Boosh plays, based on a Ron Moody character, that has ‘Polo mints for eyes’. It also reminds me of Screaming Lord Sutch, an English rock’n’roll character from the ’60s. But John reckons it’s accidental that he looks as though he might want to talk to me about eels; rather, the look grew out of the costume, first and foremost. “I just thought, ‘Hey, let’s put on all of our steampunk gear today and see how we look. Oh, I look a little like an aristocrat…’”

The ‘steam punk’ clobber comes from Gallery Serpentine, a ‘goth shop’ that sponsors John by slinging clothing in his direction “every once in a while”. So, he says, “I’m wearing one of their frock coats. I’ve got one of their corsets on, I’m wearing their shirt… the hat was mine.” As to the poster image for the show, John’s feeling was, “how good would it be if I were to have these really horrifying distended fingers?” His buddy Mel, “this tremendous graphic designer” that John insists is on par with Shaun Tan (Tan is “a more dream-like, less photo-realistic version” of Graeme Bass, according to John), ‘knocked it up’ for him with little effort.

“It’s the finest piece of graphic design I’ve ever been associated with,” John says. “Mel’s been my best friend for years and she really hates it. So much. Tim Ferguson wrote to me and told me that he likes it. I told Mel, and she was so embarrassed. She would have preferred if he’d seen any of her body of work that wasn’t that.”

The show A Nifty History of Evil itself, according to John, is about “marketing, blood and style”. It’s an historical journey through “obscure moments of evil mythology”. So it features “Philippino vampires, a puppet show about the Marquis de Sade, a happy song about Stalin’s Purges which is basically Goldilocks and the Three Bears retold from a soviet perspective…” – a little bit of everything, really. If it’s inspired by anything, it’s the facts gleaned as a kid from children’s encyclopedias.

“I really liked those entries you’d stumble across that would end, ‘and then he massacred all of them’,” John says. “When it’s been divorced from context by about 400 years and then phrased in a children’s encyclopedia, it usually tends to be great. I basically wanted to put together a horrible history of the world, and some of these things are just excruciatingly funny.”

What sort of things are excruciatingly funny? He offers the possible alternative endings to World War II as an example. Both the Russians and American were working on secret weapons that would finally bring the conflict to an end, once and for all. The Americans were developing the deadly ‘Bat Bomb’, essentially “a bat with dynamite strapped to it,” according to John.

“They were going to release these over Tokyo. They never did it because the first day they were experimenting with the bats in a secret army base, they flew up into the roof and, when they exploded, took out the base.” The historical consequence of this was the Americans developing the more cost effective nuclear fusion. “It was cheaper to develop the atom bomb.”

At the same time, John says, the Russians were developing the ‘dog bomb’ – a dog with a landmine strapped to it. Dogs were being trained – no doubt via Pavlov’s classical conditioning, to run under German tanks, by putting food under tanks. “But the Russians didn’t have any German tanks for the dogs to practice on,” John reports, “so the dogs would go out into battle, look at German tanks and freak out, then look at Russian tanks which they associated with food, run back to them, and explode.”

These ridiculous historical factoids are great, but better still, for John, are the moments in the show when people hear about stuff they already know, but weren’t aware others were into.

“I’ve seen a large guy dressed in footy shorts cheer when I mention Countess Elizabeth Bathory,” John says. And why shouldn’t an apparent rugger bugger cheer at in recognition of the horrible Hungarian ruler who used to bathe in the blood of young virgin women – since beauty products containing the stem cells of discarded fetuses weren’t yet on the market – in order to remain youthful? 

Likewise, “troupes of young women high five each other” when John begins to discuss Lilith, the first woman. Well, she’s the first woman according to the Kabala and variations of the original myth from which the Adam and Eve story is reportedly derived. Apparently, Lilith was banished from the Garden of Eden by God because she refused to acquiesce to Adam as husband and boss. Depending on the version of the story, Lilith disappears, becomes a howling wind, or becomes a vampire who preys on children and pregnant women. No guesses which version of the story A Nifty History of Evil deals with…

This has been a long conversation, admittedly, John concludes, but it’s the last chance we’ll get to have one for a while. “The minute I finish the show in Sydney,” he says, “I’m flying home to Perth where I’ll spend four hours changing my bags over so that I can fly to Edinburgh and do 44 shows in 22 days. Then I’m doing club work in the UK until October.”

There you have it. If you want to see A Nifty History of Evil in Sydney, John’s doing it at the Comedy Store, Sunday July 25^th. Until then, he’s featuring in the Store’s season of ‘Heavy Weights of Ha Ha’ featuring Bruce Griffiths, Chris Wainhouse, Smart Casual, Jackie Loeb, Joel Creasey, Amelia Jane Hunter, Rhys Nicholson, Umit Bali and Emma Markezic. Oh, but during August you can see A Nifty History of Evil in Edinburgh!