Fringe at its gut-clutching best when it layers on the cringe

Winnipeg Free Press

2 days ago

I have just laughed as hard as I have at the Winnipeg Fringe Festival in 20 years.
Prodded in the gut until air escaped me in the most embarrassing way.
The offending object was a play by Winnipeg performer Donnie Baxter called Shit: The Musical, which has its last show at 8:45 p.m. tonight.
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Shit: The Musical possesses a kind of gonzo spirit.
My bright, witty peer Jeffrey Vallis gave it a one-star review in the Free Press last week.
'(It) feels like a '90s after-school show gone horribly wrong — like if Barney sang about bowel movements instead of friendship,' he writes.
'Set in a university lecture hall, Dr. Eaton Fartmore teaches a class on the semantics of poop through stories and off-key songs that drag on like a bad bout of constipation.'
All of this is essentially true — in fact, the play's narrative is perhaps even flimsier than this.
But there's little accounting for taste — or for the tasteless things we savour. I will endeavour all the same. Imagine you are at the beautifully modern Theatre Cercle Moliere, named after France's most renowned satirist of its classical theatre. It's 11 p.m. on a Wednesday and there's a senior citizen singing tunelessly, 'Farts, farts, farts, always stink, don't you think? It's a shame, this awful name.'
The awful name in question is his own, Dr. Fartmore, and this professor of linguists is riffing on Shakespeare's line about roses smelling as sweet by any other name.
Groan?
The audience of 30 assembled isn't laughing. Not yet. The fact they are not, only makes me laugh harder. It's as though we've all been ensnared in one of Ionesco's or Artaud's glorious trolls on audiences in their mid-century absurdist experiments.
But for this to be funny for a few, seemingly it has to stink for many — including obviously Vallis, who does have a good sense of humour. I'm sure his bad review wasn't happily received by performer-playwright Baxter because at the end of the day, bad reviews are usually bad business.
Fringe performers sink thousands of dollars and countless hours — staking not just their savings, but their reputations — on the chance to entertain us and hopefully break even. And they do it at a time when live theatre is said to be more endangered than ever, dulled by the narcotic pull of screen media: TikTok and Instagram memes, Netflix and the ever-churning algorithm.
Believe it or not, we reviewers — as much as some may curse our names in the fringe beer tent — try to bear this in mind. But as Orwell's old adage goes, oddly fitting for the high politics of local theatre: 'Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.'
All to say: Vallis's pointed, funny reaction to Shit: The Musical is as valid as the myriad bad, middling and good reviews we've issued through this festival.
Still, in ultimately relenting to Baxter's routine I felt I was exorcising something. A resistance that reviewers like me can develop to a certain spirit of fringe that stubbornly eludes the star system. A gonzo spirit shared by another DIY artform supposedly destroying live art like theatre: internet memes.
I mean especially those associated online humour styles that go by names like post-irony, shitposting, layered cringe.
This is absurdist, often lowbrow humour that echoes older comedians such as Andy Kauffman, Tom Green, Eric Andre and Tim Heidecker.
But otherwise, it's distinctly Gen Z — mocking those Millennials whose humour is still stuck in the era of YouTube, Vines and Jim Carrey movies when comedy meant straightforward skits, polished punchlines and mugging for the camera.
Maybe it also owes something to a certain stubborn set of ideas still circulating in universities.
Most liberal arts students, sooner or later, encounter the work of another French oddball who came after Ionesco and Artaud: Jean-François Lyotard, with his theory of postmodernity.
This theory (stick with me) says we now live in a postmodern era — an age where 'grand narratives' have collapsed. Big, sweeping explanations such as Marxism or Christianity no longer hold sway. Instead, knowledge loops back on itself: science, ethics and meaning justify themselves by referencing other systems, not some fixed reality.
Lyotard knew this would leave us ironic, skeptical, suspicious of truth claims — and he seemed basically fine with that. His critics weren't. They called it nihilism and accused him of corrupting young minds with moral relativism.
Right or wrong about knowledge or modernity, Lyotard was strangely ahead of his time when it comes to understanding humour. So much of online youth humour feels postmodern today. It disdains narrative. Conventional storytelling jokes, unless ironically dumb, are old hat.
Humour now is 'irony-poisoned,' as the phrase goes — self-referential, looping endlessly through layers of memes. But in being 'poisoned,' it's also frequently amoral, cruel even.
This humour delights in mocking 'theatre kids' and older generations — people who crack earnest, dorky jokes and wear their sincerity a little too openly. Their guileless enthusiasm gets labelled 'cringe,' then enjoyed and recreated ironically for laughs.
I am, despite these misgivings and my elder Millennial status, addicted to absurd Gen Z humour.
Which leads me to wonder: is it possible I enjoyed the plotless Shit: The Musical and other one-star fare this year for unkind reasons? Was I laughing at Baxter, this 'theatre kid' in his 60s with juvenile but sincere humour who can't carry a tune to save his life, instead of with him? Maybe at first.
But Baxter was also clearly laughing at us — trolling us like Eric Andre or an online shitposter, figures he may know nothing about, to test our prudish reflexes. Our lack of whimsy.
And a certain point, about halfway through the play, it worked. The audience started giggling, going along with Baxter. Then roaring. So many fringe shows reach melodramatically for the universal in the most sublime and tragic things. Heaven and hell.
Baxter's awkward, taboo stories about embarrassing trips to the bathroom on first dates and his surprisingly enlightening explanation of healthy stool shapes felt oddly more honest.
I've had a lovely fringe festival this year.
And reflecting back, I think the shows that have stayed with me weren't always the tight, touring shows I may have felt obligated to award high stars to. They weren't the shows with wham-bam, but ultimately safe, humour delivered with the finesse of new Simpsons or old Johnny Carson episodes.
They were the ones that really took chances, lowbrow and highbrow. Shows that had at something at stake creatively, not just financially, even if they were messy.
Especially plays such as Debbie Loves Bumblebee, The Apricot Tree, Brainstorm, Parasocial and Baxter's bonkers production. Most of which, for me, point in one way or another to throughlines between the wild theatre of modernism and the fringe and the chaotic DIY culture that proliferates online today.
Shows that might also help to bridge the generational gap where live theatre is concerned, drawing in more young people to a festival that, let's be honest, skews towards an older audience.
There's a couple of days left of the festival, and I hope more audiences take chances on the fringiest of Fringe shows — especially if me or my colleagues have panned them.
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Conrad SweatmanReporter
Conrad Sweatman is an arts reporter and feature writer. Before joining the Free Press full-time in 2024, he worked in the U.K. and Canadian cultural sectors, freelanced for outlets including The Walrus, VICE and Prairie Fire. Read more about Conrad.
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