Edinburgh 2022: Chris Gethard Guest Blog

Ahead of its run at the 2022 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Chris Gethard blogs for BroadwayWorld about bringing A Father and the Sun to the Gilded Balloon this August.

The last time I performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival was in 2016, with a show called Career Suicide. I loved the experience, though the festival itself is daunting. Its pace, its size, its relentlessness. I loved working on my show and getting it as good as it could be. I knew when the festival was over that I'd love to do it again someday. But I knew I would never do it just to do it. I had to have a show that had something to say. I had to meet the bar for the festival, and the bar I'd set for myself.

This proved intimidating. Career Suicide wound up going to HBO, being produced by Judd Apatow, and garnering critical acclaim. More importantly, it effected a lot of people. I still regularly get messages from people telling that the show - which focused on my struggles with depression and some suicide attempts - helped them.

That's a tough standard to chase.

This year, I'm bringing a very different show to Edinburgh. I knew it was time to give it a shot when the show put itself together. As a comedian, I'm always writing and trying out new jokes. After my son was born, a lot of my new material focused on parenthood. How could it not? I write from real life, and parenting was my whole life now.

But the more I wrote, the more I realized my focus was less on being a parent and more about understanding parenthood - particularly, the parenting of my father. As my writing became less about my son and more about my dad, I realized something very exciting was happening - some of the best individual jokes no longer fit in my hour. They weren't on theme, they didn't fit this show. I was now writing an album. Those other jokes might be hit singles, but they had to be put on the backburner. I needed the room to attack this larger idea.

I remembered some stories from childhood I'd long blocked out. I followed up with my father, asking him his reasoning for certain choices made 30 years ago, things that never made sense to me back then but suddenly make perfect sense now that I'm a dad myself. I thought a lot about how his generation was taught about things like toughness, being a breadwinner, what it means to be a man. I had racing thoughts about how differently people my age view those concepts now. Is that a good thing? A bad thing? I don't know. Write more jokes and let's see if they keep revealing more pieces to the puzzle.

Sometimes younger comedians ask me about Edinburgh, if and when they should mount a show at the festival. The short answer is "Go, the worse that happens is you eat it for a month and lose a lot of money." But the more positive version would be to tell them that sometimes your writing takes on this form, where you realize you're no longer forcing it, you're chasing it. You're scribbling things down after your practice runs so you don't forget them. Other comics start asking you why you're taking the risks you are. That means it's time to take it out of the clubs and put on a show.

I think. Who knows?

All I know is that I had fun in 2016, and I take this festival seriously enough to want to meet its bar. I think this new show might do it. Soon, the crowds will let me know. Edinburgh, there's nothing like it.

See Chris Gethard: A Father and the Sun at the Gilded Ballon during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe from 3-28 August. For more information and tickets visit www.edfringe.com or www.gildedballoon.co.uk

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