The key to performing standup is to convince your audience that you don’t want their attention or approval as much as you obviously do. This task is made harder if, 30 minutes before the show, you accosted some of these people on the street, handed them a picture of your face and begged them to watch you.
This is my experience of flyering for my show at the Edinburgh festival fringe – and it’s the same for many acts here, barring the famous ones. Flyering can undermine your onstage mystique and annoy pedestrians, but it plays a big role at the festival. There are no restrictions on flyering in Edinburgh’s public areas, although flyposting is illegal.
You might ask why performers still bother with leaflets in 2023. There are better tools, such as Instagram, TikTok and so on. But building an online following is basically a career on its own; it can involve making several videos a week over many months. Some standups have taken to filming all their live shows in order to harvest clips to post on social media. (The comedian Will Rowland sums up this cycle in one of my favourite show titles this year, Clip Farm.) I have chosen the simpler, if not more dignified, method of sidling up to strangers on the pavement like a stray dog. Except that a dog would probably shift more tickets. Note to self: attach flyers to dog.
I have learned that commanding a street is a different skill from commanding a room. Come fringe time, Edinburgh is crawling with rival entertainers. A standup loitering in a T-shirt can’t compete with all the colourful drag acts, magicians and people on stilts, so you have to find ways to stand out. Not that I have managed this. If I have any strategy, it is to be a bit sarcastic about the whole thing, as if to signal to passersby that I don’t actually mind when I say: “Can I interest you in a comedy show?” and someone replies: “Are you funny?” and I can’t think of a witty response.
At least there is the camaraderie among performers. The character comedian Charlie Vero-Martin is promoting her show Picnic at the Underbelly while wearing a pair of very long arms. (She declines to tell me why.)
“I’m from Edinburgh, so I’ve experienced both sides of the flyers,” she says. “I’ve been the performer and I’ve been the tired person returning from work. I have thick skin, but I do find it sad when someone says: ‘I don’t do comedy.’ Or they hand the flyer back and say I don’t look like my picture. But when someone actually comes along, that makes it all worth it.”
Horatio Gould, who is performing his show Sweet Prince at the Pleasance Courtyard, considers flyering part of paying his dues: “Lots of hard work goes into comedy, but it feels most stark when you’re flyering. It’s a good experience for a young comedian – probably not for an old comedian. I hope to graduate from it.” His worst moment came while flyering for a friend’s show about cancer. “I told someone: ‘It’s a show about cancer,’ and they burst into tears. It’s not a very funny story, really.”
Gould plans to hire people to hand out flyers, although this can bring its own problems: “Last year, I hired several people. Some were really good; others didn’t hand any out at all. I don’t blame them. I probably wouldn’t put much work in myself,” he says.
Some venues, such as Summerhall, have banned flyers, to reduce paper waste. This environmental issue was the focus of the musical comedian Jon Long last year, who promoted his show with only two flyers with QR codes on them. “It wasn’t easy,” he says. “I’ve tried to make all my shows sustainable. I started by using recycled flyers, but they’re not infinitely renewable.”
I suppose it’s just as well that I did only a short run – 10 days, ending last weekend – rather than the typical full month of August. Long has gone one better; he isn’t putting on a show at all, but doing a YouTube special. “Edinburgh isn’t sustainable in its current model,” he says. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society seems to agree: one of its development goals published last year was to be a net zero event by 2030.
Long reminds me that flyering shouldn’t be about handing out paper, anyway; it’s about striking up engaging conversations. Inspired, I return to my patch on Drummond Street. “Comedy show?” I ask a passing man. He ignores me.
• Alfie Packham: My Gift to You is at the Camden fringe, London, on 20 and 27 August
