TR: I'm very happy to share this "guest post" written by Tess reflecting on our day at the Edinburgh Fringe yesterday. I'll take this opportunity to mention that this blog not reached a clear consensus as to when and how humor should be included in articles.

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“I don’t think I like comedy.” We laugh. Tom and I are spending our lunch frantically searching for shows to fill the rest of our afternoon in Edinburgh. This is easier said than done, requiring a lot of back-and-forth and cross-referencing between websites with internet that’s patchy at best. We end up searching increasingly random, borderline-insufferable terms in the search bar. At one point I am looking for shows related to crosswords, hoping for something which could scratch my cryptic itch. Tom is browsing the ‘cerebral’ tag.

We’d journeyed to Edinburgh this morning with only one item on the agenda - Depths of Wikipedia, a show presented by Annie Rauwerda of the namesake social media presence. The show is at 12, leaving a 6-hour gap in our itinerary before a 7pm dinner reservation.

The show had been exactly what I expected as a long-term follower. Annie takes us through a journey, mostly through screenshots of real Wikipedia articles, which present us with the humour in the everyday: ironic image captions; tumultuous section headings; and the behind-the-scenes community (and infighting) that makes Wikipedia Wikipedia. Wikipedia isn’t meant to be funny – in fact, Annie points out that humour is actively discouraged – but humour pops up everywhere for those looking for it, and Depths of Wikipedia has perfected the art of highlighting the absurdity and profundity of what could otherwise be banal.

The humour is primarily observational, with the second half of screenshots revealed like a punchline. The crowd loves it – I’m sure it was one of the most laughed-at shows at 12pm on a Sunday. What’s more surprising to me is that many of the crowd admit at the start to have never even heard of Depths of Wikipedia. My initial assumption – perhaps arrogantly – was that the crowd would entirely be comprised of composed of other moderately online 20- or 30-somethings. But that’s exactly why the show works – almost all of us use Wikipedia regularly, and have a collective understanding of the format. One of the funniest moments is the reveal of the Kendrick Lamar v Drake feud being presented in the war format infobox – an example of strict format rules creating accidentally hilarious moments.

I actually find myself welling up multiple times, and may have let a tear fall over a picture of a long-dead pet dog forever immortalised on the page for Samoyeds. The touching moments are allowed to be touching without an overlay of humour - the show is in part a call to arms, with Annie arguing for the joy and community found through editing Wikipedia, using real-world examples of unlikely everyday people whose contributions have shaped the site. She was at the Fringe, in part, with WikiPortraits, and urged us to contribute if we can. I think we all walk out at the end of the show itching to create accounts and start editing – or perhaps I am projecting again.

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By the end of lunch we have eventually landed on a couple of choices which line up perfectly with our schedule, so without much time to deliberate after food and a coffee we trek through the rain to one of the farthest-flung venues of the festival to see Mistakes on Maps.

The description - promising a deep-dive into 20 unusual, incorrect and informative maps - entices us enough that we head over despite the sold out show, hoping to purchase tickets on the door. We're permitted entry with a £10 donation each to the charity that runs the venue, cheaper than the £13.50 online tickets.

Almost as soon as the show begins, however, I wish that we hadn’t bothered. The show is presented by three members of a rotating ensemble who have travelled from California to the Fringe¹. The format is grating, with the mic passed from member-to-member for the different sections, while the remaining two make quips and interjections after every other line, not even attempting to look up from their scripts. The husband-and-wife duo are the worst, with his alleged interest in maps being a punching bag for her nagging wife schtick. The interest is only alleged because, despite being the premise for the show, I don’t get any sense from any of the presenters that they have any particular interest in maps – beyond, perhaps, a shallow aesthetic inclination.

The 16 (notably fewer than the advertised 20) themes of the show breeze through maps from antiquity, through Ptolemy and into 20th century paper towns and modern digital mapping apps. Each theme could have been enough to fill the almost hour-long performance, but instead they are presented in eight to twelve slides illustrated primarily through AI-generated imagery combining what could be archival material with gaudy illustrations of the subject pondering their work/journey/death/whatever (who am I to guess what the AI-generated thinker is pondering?). It is dire, and leaves me wondering how much of the show is human-generated. Certainly the end-of-theme rhyming couplets² reek of LLM. The gaudy imagery is only out-naffed by the costumes and accessories the current speaker adorns. Hats, novelty t-shirts and wigs are paraded before the start of each segment (during the opening song snippet with tangentially relevant lyrics) and worn like a shield during the presentations.

Key map themes are touched on – that a two-dimensional map cannot accurately represent a three-dimensional globe, for example, or that maps can only reflect the world that the mapmaker knows – but these are so lightly touched and cackhandedly discarded that the speakers betray what seems to be a complete disdain for their subject. Combined with the constant quips, AI imagery and costuming, I think the presenters do not believe their subject to be interesting or funny enough to stand on its own. This is demonstrably untrue – see Map Men, who regularly get over a million views on their funny, informative and silly videos about maps.

The premise of the show is that maps have mistakes, and the show description suggests that these mistakes might be “accidents, ambition, propaganda or fear of empty space”, but the show itself does little to answer or even explore these ideas, instead feeling simply like an opportunity to point and laugh uncritically at something that the presenters – and by extension, the audience – is supposed to be genuinely interested in. I leave feeling embarrassed, like I had just spent 50 minutes being made fun of for having an interest in what is hardly a niche subject.

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Feeling a bit pent-up, we storm onwards, back towards the Royal Mile to see Excel Comedy and Mathem-antics, a show about Excel, maths, and a Secret Third Thing. We are almost late to the start because Google Maps is incapable of directing us through Edinburgh’s multi-layered streets and we end up multiple stories too high– if only there was a show at the Fringe which was well placed to turn such confusion into humour.

Excel Comedy and Mathem-antics is presented by David Benaim, who is a former Deloitte consultant turned online Excel guru turned spreadsheet-oriented comedian. Much like the first two shows of the day, it has a niche appeal – but not that niche, with the cave-like venue almost completely filled. I am by no means an Excel power user – I do hate the F1 key, but it remains dutifully installed on my keyboard – but the humour centred on common frustrations and idiosyncrasies of the software resonates with me as an always pedantic sometimes spreadsheeter.

As well as the Excel-focused observational comedy, which is the most successful in my opinion, David also uses maths puns and sex jokes (“hyperbolic” is deformed into a “hyper-ball-lick”) to add layers of humour. The sex jokes wear thin after a couple of lines, and get the least laughs from the audience. We want less sex and more keyboard shortcuts, damn it! The entire show uses copious amounts of self-deprecating humour, which, unlike the prior show, actually makes sense – it’s pretty uncool to be an Excel-themed comedian, but who better to fill this role than a man who has been recognised by Microsoft as one of the top Excel users in the world? And he plays it off well – the audience is engaged, shouting out answers to questions about deep cut keyboard shortcuts and hidden workarounds for our shared grievances. We cheer when someone shouts the correct answer. The comedy derives from finding a shared experience in what is usually a pretty solitary activity; we’re in a room filled with people who are also unironically excited about finding out the AutoSum keyboard shortcut³.

The show ends on a surprisingly earnest note – verging on saccharine – when David gets to the Secret Third Thing not disclosed in the show description. It is honest, personal and touching and has enough connection to the body of the show to not feel completely shoehorned in.

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On the train home I reflect on my earlier declaration of comedy hatred. It obviously isn’t true – and was tongue-in-cheek at the time – but does echo my dislike for traditional stand-up comedy material. I like a show with a theme I can really latch onto, which reflects my world back at me through a new lens. I was drawn to all three of these shows because of their slightly PowerPoint-esque formats and specialist subjects: I want someone more knowledgeable than me about something I love to make me see it from a new perspective. Depths of Wikipedia and Excel Comedy both succeeded at this, so why did Mistakes on Maps fail so badly?

One obvious potential cause for the rift is nationality. Mistakes on Maps was presented by a group of Americans, and it’s pretty well known that American and British humour can be quite drastically different. The self-deprecating jokes illustrate this, with Excel Comedy’s David (a Gibraltarian, but with a much more British sense of humour) pulling them off much more successfully and subtly. But I find Americans funny – Annie of Depths of Wikipedia is from New York, and I thought hers was the funniest show of the three.

Maybe, then, it’s generational. Annie is a couple of years younger than me and David is 11 years older (to the day!) putting them at opposite fringes of Millennial. I don’t know how old the Mistakes on Maps troupe are, but they are certainly much older – Gen X verging on Boomer, if we are using the generational framework. I dislike this analysis – I think the idea of generations is vastly oversimplified and cannot be applied to individuals (a very Zillennial opinion, perhaps) – but I think it is narrowing in on part of the answer. Depths and Excel both have strong online presences, a space in which individuals can hone niche communities of like-minded individuals from across the world, something which was difficult if not impossible a couple of decades ago. It makes sense then that internet natives have embraced the idea that it is possible to find others who are just as interested in a subject as you are, and will find humour where you also find it.

I think Mistakes on Maps fell apart because I did not believe they were experts in their subject – I barely believed they were even interested in it. Although their story opened by telling us about the husband’s burgeoning map collection, we’re not told why he is interested in historic maps or why we should share that interest. Depths of Wikipedia and Excel Comedy were both presented by people who had credible personal connection to their subjects with a throughline from burgeoning interest to specialist subject. They find their subjects funny because they look at them closely, and expect the audience to have some level of close-lookingness too. This narrows the niche, almost certainly alienating audience members who don’t share their penchant for close-up detailed attention – but I think that’s the point. If you are offering a niche experience, you need to trust that your audience are willing to share that niche with you. This is surely much more palatable to digital natives, who are used to being able to find (or form) a community of like-minded individuals through their devices.

Crucially, though, I think that the Mistakes on Maps troupe just aren’t that good at observational humour. Wikipedia and Excel are not meant to be funny – so using them as both the setup and punchline of a joke becomes funny in itself. We see the mundane transposed into a comedic format – the format is funny, as well as the joke. Maps are also not meant to be funny! Mistakes on Maps completely miss a trick by not leaning into these subverted expectations – the closest they get is in one of the very first segments, where the quippy interjector notes that the 8BCE stone tablet depicting the earth would be difficult to fold. Maybe it would have been funnier with better timing and delivery, but it is still fundamentally a much weaker joke than Depths of Wikipedia simply showing us a screenshot of the supposed war admirals Kendrick Lamar and Drake. No AI required.

But ultimately, Depths of Wikipedia and Excel Comedy both braved to venture beyond comedy and into earnestness. Annie and David stood in front of their respective audiences and said “I care about something, and this is why you should too”. They emphasised the human nature-ness of their stories, bringing us into their worlds and letting us in on the joke. The Mistakes on Maps team hid their passion behind an AI-generated façade, refusing to reach out to the audience to pull us into their world. I love slightly nerdy humour. I love Wikipedia. I love maps. I like Excel (sorry, Excel). And I want the people who are making jokes about what I love to unashamedly love them too, even if that can verge on the sentimental or saccharine. That’s why I’m looking forward to next year’s Fringe, where hopefully there will be a show about finding humour, intrigue and a Secret Third Thing in cryptic crosswords.

¹ They haven’t even bothered to learn how to pronounce Glasgow.

² They’re not all couplets, and arguably they don’t all rhyme.

³ Alt+=