Stand up and Comedian’s Comedian podcaster Stuart Goldsmith‘s show craftsmanship just keeps getting better and better. Like I Mean It won Best New Show at the Leicester Comedy Festival earlier this year, despite still being unfinished, so it looks as though Goldsmith is set for another brilliant year in Edinburgh. Stuart is performing his free show at the Liquid Room Annexe throughout August.
1) What excites you most about the Edinburgh Festival?
The chance to feel like a normal human being for an entire month, as everyone around me lives my life: thinking, talking, eating and breathing comedy! And the “macaroni pie”, which is unavailable in the real world.
© Matt Crockett
2) What was your first Edinburgh show about?
It was called “The Reasonable Man” in 2010, and it was about realising I’d spent my whole life trying ever so hard to be alternative, but despite my best endeavours I was actually (depressingly) normal.
3) Does your comedy attract a certain type of audience?
Nice people! I’m incredibly lucky – I almost never get heckled, and anything people do shout out tends to be encouragement. At a recent new material night a heckler shouted “yeah – seems like a ‘bit’!”
4) What is the worst experience you’ve had with Edinburgh accommodation?
Oooh, probably when I stayed in a suspiciously cheap rental place in Haymarket, which turned out to have no lock on the door and effectively a bunkhouse where people wandered in and out all day. I had a watch stolen which had just been given to me by my then girlfriend. Still, I was too cheap to fork out for decent accommodation despite enjoying at the time a street-performer’s pre-boom income, so you buy cheap you buy twice, or whatever people say. “You pay peanuts you get your monkeys stolen”. Something like that.
5) What is your most treasured memory of your comedy career so far?
Well I’ve been lucky to have a few sparkly show-off gigs, but bringing my baby onstage at the final performance of last year’s Edinburgh show (which had been all about him) was hilarious and heart-warming and better than Wembley.
6) What show will you definitely be seeing at the festival this year?
Andy Daly. He’s an American improviser who did the world’s best piss-take of standup comedy. Search “Jerry Ahearn Standup” on youtube and cry laughing. He’s at the Gilded Balloon in an improv show and we shall become best friends.
7) What do you hope to gain from the Edinburgh Festival this year?
I’d like to come out of it with some money, a finely-tuned tour show that’s ready to take on the road, and these days due to the sobriety of fatherhood, some actual un-fogged memories for once! I don’t drink at the festival anymore, and i’m staying in a house with dear friends and two other babies, so we’re going to have wholesome super-fun and go swimming and hang out at play-parks and it’s going to be all squeaky cle- AAAAAAAAARRRGHHHHHHHH.
8) What do you imagine your last ever show will be about?
I try to do every show as if it’s my last, yeah? Because I’m an incredibly pretentious wanker.
BOOK TICKETS FOR STUART GOLDSMITH: LIKE I MEAN IT, AT THE EDINBURGH FESTIVAL