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Bridget Christie, John Kearns, Adrienne Truscott win the major awards at 2013 #EdFringe

Bridget Christie wore a “No More Page 3” shirt when she won the Foster’s Edinburgh Comedy Awards honor for Best Show at the 2013 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Her show, Bridget Christie: A Bic For Her, carried this description: “Star of BBC Radio 4’s Bridget Christie Minds the Gap, BBC2’s It’s Kevin, and Comedy Central’s Alternative Comedy Experience, starts the day by eroticising waterproof jackets and roller coasters, ridiculing biro manufacturers, and destroying the patriarchy. And all at 11:10 am in a Gloucester accent. Includes some shouting. The only stand-up to have been billed alongside both Lionel Blair and Naomi Wolf.”

Upon winning, Christie told The Independent: ““I’m not sure if it’s a zeitgeist-y thing,” she says, “but  this award does feel like it’s part of something bigger.”

Well, yes. It does seem like Edinburgh was going for things both big and zeitgeist-y for the summer of 2013.

John Kearns, who won for Best Newcomer for his show, “Sight Gags For Perverts,” had a delightfully perverted response on Twitter on Saturday afternoon, quipping: “I got Steve Coogan and John Bishop to fuck themselves with their own shyt. This is my first proper tweet.”

And saving the biggest, zeitgeist-y thing for last…

In a victory for Americans, feminists, Kickstarter, DIY and people not traditionally thought of as stand-up comedians, the festival awarded its Panel Prize to New Yorker Adrienne Truscott for Adrienne Truscott’s Asking for It: A One-Lady Rape About Comedy Starring Her Pussy and Little Else!

adrienne-truscott

As in, Truscott took down Daniel Tosh and others for their rape jokes, all while not wearing any pants. Or panties. You got that from the title, didn’t you?

This, from The Scotsman’s review of Truscott’s show: “Finally! At long, long last, after all the humour-free, cliché-ridden, post-feminist carping and whinging, we get a woman who takes rape jokes and jokers and gives them what they have obviously been asking for all along. This show is brutal, brilliant and brave. It is painfully funny, and if you miss it you will miss the moment in the history of stand-up comedy wherein a woman actually took the genre and did something with it that no man could do. It is an extraordinary hour. All the more so because Adrienne Truscott isn’t even (or wasn’t until now) a stand-up. She is one half of the fabulous Wau Wau Sisters but, wau, is she sticking it to ’em now.”

Other reviews of Truscott, via Chortle, The Times, and The Guardian.

Adrienne Truscott was known before this as a New York choreographer. In 2004, she won “Best Cabaret” act at Edinburgh. Almost a decade later, she returned, this time, via Kickstarter.

A one-hour show about rape and comedy? Truscott earned $5,623 of her $4,000 Kickstarter goal in getting to Edinburgh. Turned out to be a great investment!

For winning the Panel Prize, Truscott earned an additional £5,000.

Sean L. McCarthy

Editor and publisher since 2007, when he was named New York's Funniest Reporter. Former newspaper reporter at the New York Daily News, Boston Herald and smaller dailies and community papers across America. Loves comedy so much he founded this site.

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