Lindsay Sharman: Comedy Spotlight

Nobody knows what character comedian Lindsay Sharman's new show is about and it seems her fortune telling skills are being put to other uses...

Feature by Ben Venables | 08 Aug 2015

Your Fringe show is listed under different titles on different listing sites and it's not even in the official brochure. If you had to change one other comedian's show title and obliterate them from existence, who would it be and what new title would they get before they disappeared?

"As if I know any other comedians or their show titles! I literally can't even remember mine. Seriously. All I know is that it's in the French Quarter, Voodoo Rooms at 2.40pm. I'll be selling my books after the show (including the electronic one). Come!"

In the first novel concerning your psychic medium character, Madame Magenta, your mother and the eponymous hero compare runes to being like 24 testicles in a sack. Have you ever found any other sex organs useful in telling the future?

"Oh yeeeeah bwaybeee, if I see a big old boner-cocksicle I can psychically foretell the next three minutes are gonna be sweeeeeeeet."

You are sometimes part of the awesome Weirdos Collective. What initiation rituals did the group make you fulfil when you first signed up?

"The initiation involved allowing Adam Larter no-holds-barred access to my husband, composer comedian Laurence Owen, who I keep chained to the radiator for just such purposes."

You once likened comedians to sociopaths. Discuss with reference to any official diagnostic criteria.

"Actually, I was misquoted: I said comedians were a lot like cycle paths. And I am qualified to say that because I have a cycling proficiency certificate from 1989."

At 5' 10" you considered yourself too tall for acting and went into comedy. Yet in another of our spotlight interviews, John Robertson pinpointed his relatively short stature as a winning asset in comedy. What is the perfect height for a comedian and why?

"I've changed my mind about the height thing: I wasn't helping the situation by conceding defeat because of an imagined physical deficiency. I realised I wasn't fighting the system by simply loping away into the distance, arms flapping disconsolately by my weirdly elongated torso. Since then, I have become #heightdefiant #bodyconfident. I won't stand in a ditch for no-one any more, and if they don't employ me because of that, then I'M TOTALLY FINE WITH THAT. #ganglytwat."

The Madame Magenta Big Live Podcast Show Extravaganza, or Magenta is the Warmest Colour, or Lindsay Sharman Gives us the Willies plays at The Voodoo Rooms, 8-16 & 18-30 Aug, 2.30pm, free. http://www.edfringe.com