Fringe 2015: Comedy and Body Image
An interesting theme from this year's Fringe was the way we consider our bodies. Comedians Helen Duff and Dave Chawner both discussed this idea in their acts – they talk to The Skinny about balancing entertainment with an important issue
It's possible that the argument about how our bodies are 'supposed' to look has become so absurd that it needs comedians to point out what happens if you follow it through to its logical end.
Plenty of Fringe shows picked up on this theme in 2015, including Helen Duff's Vanity Bites Back (a mock cookery show pilot, where demonically enthusiastic host Jill is not as she would like to appear) and Dave Chawner’s Normally Abnormal (a follow-up show documenting what happened after he brought an oft-overlooked male perspective on anorexia to the Fringe in 2014).
Chawner points out that the common ideas which surround us on these issues can often be misleading. For example, it is not widely known that the first recorded case of anorexia was diagnosed in a male, so when boys or men who succumb to what Chawner describes as a process of "addiction and obsession", they may find themselves further isolated due to a general lack of awareness in society.
In addition, this leaves us grasping for ways to boost the profiles of certain issues, which are not always in our best interests. Chawner explains his frustration that we “almost need a celebrity to validate any kind of human difficulty."
Sometimes life is more complicated, however. "When I first knew I wanted to write about anorexia," says Helen Duff, "I was concerned about simplifying; people saying, ‘Oh, now I know why Jill got like that' – and it’s not like that at all.”
Duff's format allows for playing with some common pitfalls when trying to live with an eating disorder: chiefly, the social aspect of eating. She describes a point in her show where she covers her arms in butter before clawing it all off as her audiences appear to connect with the creeping discomfort. She observes that the vast majority of her audience will be people with blessedly no experience of eating disorders: "Some of your audience will be people with no experience of eating disorders, and the point is still that they need to find it entertaining.”
Both performers mentioned this and the trickiness it can pose: "It would be really easy to go for the cheap laughs," says Chawner on tackling these issues through stand-up, "but that wouldn’t do the subject any justice.”
The freedom of expression that the Fringe allows means that stand-ups are ideally poised to talk about these issues, of course, and comedy enables an audience to let their guard down and be receptive to ideas they perhaps hadn't thought about. It's difficult to crystallise such a breadth of experience into an hour. But there’s many good reasons to try, and plenty for anyone to learn from these shows, regardless of the nature of their relationship with food and their body.