Come flyer with me

At the Edinburgh Fringe, some things remain decidedly old-school. Sure, you can get your audience to leave reviews on the Fringe website, or market your play via Instagram ads. But print remains one of the main tools used by performers to get bums on seats in their shows. Partly, this is through the posters that cover every available surface in the city centre—mostly via a set of council-agreed campaign boards, but also on venues themselves, in various shops and cafés that have agreed to host them, and good old-fashioned flyposting.¹

But a tactic even more associated with the Fringe is giving out flyers for your show on the street (or paying someone else to do it for you). Sometimes this is just by standing outside your venue in the hour or so before your show, hoping to catch some last-minute punters. Sometimes, it involves going to known high-traffic areas and giving out as many of the things as possible: for example, there is a street² between Bristo Square and George Square, two of the main venue clusters with no other practical way between them, that gives you a vague sense of what running the gauntlet would be like.³

Indeed, this is so prevalent that the word has been verbed, so that you might say something like “I was flyering for my show this morning”. This doesn’t seem to be a usage exclusively associated with the Fringe—but the quotation supporting the use as a verb on the Wiktionary entry for “flyer” is from a book called The Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide, so you can draw your own conclusions from that.

There are various degrees of enthusiasm with which one can hand out flyers. At a basic level is just standing in the street and holding a flyer in an outstretched arm, hoping that someone will be desperate enough for a show that they’ll just take it from you.⁴ The next level up for a flyer pitch might be to proffer the flyer while saying something along the lines of:

Free comedy in ten minutes, right here!⁵

Beyond that, you might stop people, or ambush them while they’re sitting at a table, and ask if you can tell them a little bit about the show. This approach has a more personal touch, and maybe a higher success rate, but at the cost of a lower number of flyers handed out per hour.

So the alternative is to take a more basic approach, handing out flyers in volume, but making your slogan something so weird that the person receiving the flyer can’t help but stop and take notice.

Which leads us to the substance of today’s post:⁶ a list of things people have said to me (or, occasionally, that I’ve overheard them saying to someone else) while flyering. These are all from this year, and all quoted (as far as possible) word-for-word. I’ll give context for a few of them, but honestly I think that for most of them I’d prefer to let your imagination run free. They are presented in chronological order.

• Shortest comedian!
• Something intellectual for a change?
• You look like a couple of punk rockers, would you like to come see our show?⁷
• ’Scuse me sir, would you like some hole?
• If you like gay things and musicals…
• Asexual theatre show?
• Do you have anxiety or just generational trauma?
• One of the strangest shows you’ll see, ever.
• ’Scuse me, are you coming to the Annual General Meeting?⁸
• It’s like Blackadder is set in a death camp.
• Twelve beautiful single dads in an improv group.
• You know her, you love her, have you ever wondered why?⁹
• Do you like frogs, frogs and crime?
• Gay gunpowder plot!
• Do you guys like chicken?¹⁰
• Ice hockey and portable toilet craftsmanship.
• BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP…
• ABBA? Aliens? Accusations?
• You look like my target market: comedy for good-looking people.
• Guys, this show’s about Dolly Parton.¹¹
• Come watch someone sell their soul tonight, for real.
• Screwed-up puppets? You wanna see some screwed-up puppets? Yeah, you wanna see some screwed-up puppets!¹²

1. Bill Posters is innocent. ↩︎
2. Which I found out two days ago was called Charles Street. ↩︎
3. Or, at the very least, the one on Gladiators. ↩︎
4. This level might be associated with people who have no connection to the show in question other than having been paid minimum wage to hand them out. ↩︎
5. If you’re wondering what the point of a free show is, see last week’s post. ↩︎
6. Yes, that’s right: everything so far has been preamble. The idea of this post was to let me post something low in effort because the Fringe has limited my writing time. This seems not to have worked. ↩︎
7. This one was said to me and my husband. Enough said, I think. ↩︎
8. This one was on a semi-deserted Victoria Street shortly after midnight. ↩︎
9. Said of the Mona Lisa. ↩︎
10. This one wasn’t actually for a Fringe show, it was for a cooking app developed by some local developers. This is an example of what biologists call “dishonest signalling”: Edinburgh in August is one of the very few places where you can actually get people to take your flyers, and they’ll only realise they’re not for a show when you’ve already gone. Another example of this was a particular religious sect that somehow got me to take two flyers on the same day; I won’t name them, because they’re famously litigious. ↩︎
11. This was after Ms Parton died this week, and was said with an unspoken “Enough said” after it. The show was actually about five famous singer-actresses, only one of whom was Dolly. ↩︎
12. This is the only one I haven’t quoted verbatim, because I try to avoid strong language on here. Replace “screwed” with another word to get the accurate pitch. ↩︎