Eddy Hare - of Crizards fame - joins Katerina Partolina Schwartz to talk about his upcoming solo Edinburgh Fringe debut, This One's On Me, uncle-hood and his forays into musical comedy.
My goals are I want this show to be good and I want people to have a good time
If you were to give me a flyer right now and convince me to go to your show, what would you say?
It's a stand-up show about a brave young man who becomes an uncle and the sacrifices he has to make to make his life fit around a niece.
What is the central theme or narrative holding it all together?
I need a better word for this, but I think it’s ‘legacy’, not like creative legacy, but just like how you’re remembered. I think of it about how my nieces and nephew will remember me, I think that’s what it is, ‘cause I talk about how I remember my uncles growing up. Central themes: being an uncle, ageing, the idea of parenting and I guess a bit about how you see yourself and how you imagine other people see you.
What was the writing process for this like?
I guess when people do their first hour of stand-up,– which maybe isn’t the best way to write a show - but often honestly you’re looking at all your bits from five years and trying to see if you can pull a show together with them. And then working out what fits and what doesn’t. Obviously not every bit of stand-up from my first like 5 years of doing comedy, not all of it is perfectly in persona and stuff, and some of it is not that good, so a lot of it is okay, that probably isn’t good enough to be in this, or that maybe works on its own in a 10 minute thing, but it doesn’t quite go with this other stuff about being an uncle or whatever cause it’s not quite like the right vibe and stuff. So, it’s kind of working out what works together, trying to work out what the common theme is, which in my case is being an uncle, the idea of having kids of my own, and what I would pass onto kids, my own and my nieces and nephew, and then filling in the gaps. Most of the material I had didn’t quite fit with it, so I was like, “Okay I need to write this much more stuff that works with that” and through doing that it started to come together. It’s still not finished, you know, there’s certainly bits that I can tell still kind of feel like a placeholder thing. It’s trying to work out a general theme that you’re writing about and then just trying to fit that brief and make everything feel like it comes together.
How does the process of developing this show compare to what you typically do with Crizards?
With Crizards, we start with a theme or a world that we want it to be set in. So, Cowboys, we wanted to do some kind of show that’s Wild West style, like a Western film influence. War show it was about trying to find some sort of theme or world that fits onto the template of male friendship basically, which is pretty open, but I feel like traditionally those are quite masculine worlds so it’s easier to see how that can work. And then we would work from there.
This show started off just looking at all the stand-up I have written over 4, I think nearly 5 years of doing it now and thinking about which bits I most enjoy, which bits feel like they make most sense for me, and then try to lean into that. So, for me it was just about this routine I had about being an uncle, which I like doing, and so I was like, “Maybe I’ll make the show about being an uncle,” and trying to expand that, trying to delve more into what I feel about that. It’s a funny thing because I think writing a stand-up show – same with Crizards anyway –there’s a bit of a feeling of like you need to work some story into it, which can feel a bit like you’re reverse-engineering the whole thing, but I guess that’s the trick that people do. That’s how you write stuff properly, I guess. It’s been fun. It’s a bit easier; writing a double act show with props and music and stuff and all that, it’s the turnaround from having an idea, to being able to try it, to then working out if it works, if it fits in the show or not takes a bit longer to get to that decision because it takes so many more variables and moving parts. That part of the process can feel so much more frustrating when you’re doing a narrative double act show, just because each idea takes quite a bit mor effort to actually test, whilst stand-up is a bit more immediate so you can just be like, “Oh maybe I’ll try this joke in that section,” and then the joke doesn’t work, you can just quite easily be like, “Alright, didn’t spend a huge amount of time on that, that’s okay, I’ll move onto the next thing.” Whereas there are times when you’re doing a show like the Crizards shows where you’ll spend loads of time on some sort of set piece, it’ll work once, then you’ll do another few WIPs and it’ll stop working and you’re like, “Ugh, got to get rid of that,” which is really annoying. But yeah, a little bit more lonely, I guess working on a stand-up show compared to a double-act show, that’s true as well. Maybe I’ll feel a little more stress because of it, because just the fear, the idea of being looked at reviewed as an individual rather than with you and your friend. It’s been good. I’ve been working with Ben Target, as a director and he’s been really nice so, feel slightly less lonely because of that, which is good. That’s been really helpful.
You have done some musical comedy previously, is that something audiences can expect in this show?
That’s something I’m working out now. That’s something for the next 50 days. I might have a song in the middle and a song at the end, that’s what I might do. I think it’s nice to break the show up like that. Basically there will either be two songs in it or there’ll be no songs, and I need to work out which works. Over the next few WIPs, I’m going to work out if the songs that I’m putting in fit the whole piece of it, and if they don’t, it’ll be a whole stand-up show. I think currently it fits together okay as a stand-up show but just trying to experiment with if adding some songs in would help elevate it a little bit or if it’ll throw people off and they’ll be like, “I thought I was watching a stand-up show.” I’ll have to see.
How did you come to musical comedy as a comedy style?
In 2020, we started just before COVID, we started making a cowboy show and I thought we should try and write songs. I wrote one song called Horse With The Long Legs that’s about one of the characters seeing a horse with really long legs and how he couldn’t believe how long the horse’s legs were, that we didn’t actually use in the 2022 cowboy show because it didn’t really fit. We obviously didn’t touch that for ages and then when we started working on the cowboys’ version for 2022, we were lie, “Oh yeah, let’s start doing songs.” Cause before that, Crizards was just, it was just us talking but we didn’t have songs, and we just found that it was quite fun. Then I started to try and write songs for solo stuff after Cowboys, and over the last year the stuff that I’ve written has been stand-up, so that sort of what I’ve just gravitated towards, but now I’m like, “Oh actually, maybe I should try and add some songs into this.” Will is a more natural songwriter than I am. I’m not a master of stand-up, but stand-up is a little easier to get from the idea to execution, whereas there’s a lot of stuff I can’t do on with a guitar. So with musical comedy, songwriting, I’m quite limited in terms of my technical ability anyway, so it’s kind of working out the sweet spot for me. I feel like stand-up you can learn different techniques and stuff a little bit easier, the learning curve is a bit less steep. My musical abilities are fairly basic because I’ve got an understanding of it, but I can’t just sit down and bash out a song really quickly and find that it works. It takes me a bit more time to develop than just writing some jokes.
How does it feel to make your debut at the Edinburgh Fringe, but technically for the second time?
It’s just as nerve-wracking, ‘cause I haven’t done it before. I’ve obviously had reviews but not as a thing where I’m saying this is meant to be a brilliant, finished show that’s worth paying like £14 or whatever they charge. So, it’s my first time doing something like that. I’m just as nervous, but it is good having had the experience of doing a run before with a double act in terms of my expectations. My goals are I want this show to be good and I want people to have a good time. It’ll be nice to get good reviews but I’m not going to go crazy if I don’t have awards and stuff. It’s hard not to think about all that. Because I’ve already been through that with Crizards and thinking about all of that stuff, it does feel nice. Like it’s good that it’s not as new to me as it would have been if I wasn’t also in a double act and didn’t have that experience before. It still feels new and a little bit scary, but exciting. But equally it feels less stressful than maybe than it would have been because I have tempered expectations. Just being like, “Focus on the show, everything else is not in your control.” And maybe I’d struggle more with that if I hadn’t done that before.
Apart from your own hour, what other shows at the Edinburgh Fringe would you recommend?
I haven’t seen it yet, but I think Jordan Brookes’ show is going to be really funny, I know it’s about the Titanic and it’s a sort of musical. Like a one-man musical thing. I’m excited to see it because that’s not something he’s done before. I know he did a WIP of it in Edinburgh last year, but it sounds like it’s very silly and big scale, so I’m really excited to see that. Chris Cantrill, I’m excited to see his show. I saw a work-in-progress of it last night and it’s really funny. Most people shows are going to be good. I have loads of friends going up, I think Micky Overman’s show will be really good.
