Edinburgh Fringe Shows Satirize Comedy Critics as Snobs
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- Andrew Doherty wrote "Reviewers Welcome … to Die!" in direct response to a three-star review he called "one of the three worst scores you can get" for his sophomore show "Sad Gay Aids Play," after "critical hosannahs" greeted his debut the year before
- The folk-horror spoof casts critic Felix Chatelier as an "up-himself" reviewer forced by demons toward redemption at a fictional Midlands fringe festival in Billington, where playwright genius "Andrew Doherty" appears to shepherd him
- Adam Riches' 50-minute interactive show "The Critic's Way" stars Caliban Monroe, a swaggering comedy critic who claims to have invented star ratings and brandishes a now-remaindered treatise on "the 'tique"
- Monroe is exposed as another "sad, lonely and pathetic" figure, out of a job after a victim of his hatchet work retaliates against a particularly indelicate review—framing the show, per Logan, as an exploration of a "changing climate for criticism"
- Logan situates these shows in a tradition of art attacking critics, citing Tom Stoppard's "The Real Inspector Hound," Sheridan's "The Critic," the horror film "Theatre of Blood," and Sarah Kane naming a torturer in "Cleansed" after theatre critic Jack Tinker
- Brian Logan awards the combined portrayal a self-deprecating "three-star review" of comedy critics, while hoping "it reads like a four"—a verdict that doubles as a defense of his own profession
Why it matters: Doherty's "Reviewers Welcome" was born from a three-star review he considered one of the three worst scores possible—and his spoof lands the same old jab: critics are "preening, nepotistic snobs" nursing their own thwarted artistic ambitions. The exchange crystallizes the perennial artist-versus-critic tension now playing out as live theatre at Edinburgh Fringe, with Logan himself caught in the audience when Riches barks, "Who wants to be a comedy critic?"
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