American comedian Brendon Lemon is set to bring two extremely relevant shows to Edinburgh Fringe this year. One is a classic British stand-up show that is “part cultural autopsy, part love letter” to America, while one completely relies on crowdwork, and is loosely based on Lemon’s own experiences with ADHD.
Ahead of the Fringe, Lemon shares his thoughts on the differences between British and American comedy, misconceptions of ADHD and how his clown training influences his comedy.
Monologues and Musicals: Can you start by telling me a bit about your shows?
Lemon: Sure thing! I’m doing two shows this year, which is either ambitious or a cry for help, I haven’t decided.
The first one is called ADHD: A Crowdwork Comedy Show, and it’s exactly what it sounds like. Nothing is written, nothing is planned, the whole show is just built from whoever happens to be in the room that night. I trained at École Philippe Gaulier in Paris, which is the clown school that basically invented the idea of making yourself look stupid in front of people as high art, and that’s in there too. It’s short, it’s chaotic, and it’s different every single night, which is either the most exciting thing about it or the most terrifying, depending on whether you’re in the audience or on stage.
The second show is An American Comedy Show That Quite Possibly Might Be Funny To The British, which I’ll be honest, I’m bringing to the one city on earth where the title either works perfectly or gets me booed off immediately. I grew up in Detroit in a very British family, so I’ve spent my whole life watching America from a slight distance even though I was inside of it, and right now that distance feels both necessary and insufficient. The show is about what it means to love a country that is, and I want to be precise here because words matter, totally and completely on fire. Like, genuinely on fire. A dumpster fire. It’s a love letter and a cultural autopsy and I’m hoping the British sense of humor about American collapse translates into ticket sales.
How does your clown training influence your comedy?
The honest answer is that clown training broke something in me that I think needed breaking.
I’ve been doing standup comedy since I was 16, so basically 24 years this summer. Before Gaulier, I was doing what most comedians do, which is armor up. You write the joke, you deliver the joke, the joke protects you from the audience. I’ve done improv since I was 14 and had been used to “having nothing” in front of an audience, but with clown, it’s even more of “nothing.” It’s terrifying. You walk out with nothing and have to make people laugh and it’s going to not work. That failure is guaranteed in clown, it’s unavoidable. You fail in front of people, and then you find out what’s actually funny about you as opposed to what you’ve decided is funny about you. You have to really, really listen to the audience. Letting the audience decide what they think is funny vs me trying to get them to see what I think is funny are very different things and sometimes comedians spend their whole career confusing one for the other.
What Gaulier gave me practically, especially for the crowdwork show, is an instinct for following the thing that’s actually happening in the room rather than the thing I planned. A crowdwork show lives or dies on whether the performer can stay present with a stranger long enough to find the thing about them that’s genuinely surprising, and clown training is basically just learning how to stay in the moment when everything is going wrong and people are watching you and you have absolutely no idea what comes next.
Which, honestly, also describes being American right now, so it’s been useful across both shows.
ADHD: A Crowdwork Comedy Show completely relies on crowdwork, with nothing written in advance. Do you find this more daunting than sticking to a routine?
Honestly, no. Is it more daunting? Not really. Is it more terrifying? It’s pretty terrifying. The written show better be good because darnit, it’s written. But the crowdwork show could go anywhere and there are no guarantees. I suspect ADHD will sometimes hit higher highs than An American Comedy Show, but the latter better hit the mark every time.
You describe An American Comedy Show That Quite Possibly Might Be Funny to the British as a British-style stand up comedy show. Can you tell me what you mean by this, and what you think the main differences between British and American comedy are?
The biggest difference, and this took me a while to really understand, is the relationship between the comedian and the audience. In American comedy, the comedian is above the room. He sees something the audience doesn’t see yet, he shows it to them, and that’s the transaction. In British comedy it’s almost the opposite, where the audience sees things the comedian doesn’t see. The comedian is slightly oblivious, slightly out of step, and the audience is in on something he isn’t. American comedy can sometimes be a little “look how great I am” from the comedian, and that attitude would never work with a British audience (just ask the audience at Blackfriars in Glasgow I didn’t make laugh for 10 minutes before I learned this). It’s a completely different dynamic between the cultures.
The other thing is that British audiences want a joke. An actual joke. Americans will sometimes laugh just because you’ve given them your take on something. Your opinion delivered with enough confidence can get a laugh in New York. That would not work in Edinburgh. British audiences want wordplay, they want puns, they want a punchline with a little embellishment on the end. They’re not interested in your hot take, they want the joke that’s inside the hot take.
The subject matter and audience’s sensibility is also different. British audiences are genuinely more open than American audiences, which surprises people because Americans think of themselves as the loose ones but they’re totally not when it comes to watching a performance. For the British, sex, politics, the general mess of being alive, they are completely comfortable with all of it. American audiences have this unspoken list of things you have to handle carefully or they’ll shift in their seats.
And finally, Americans want resolution. We’re such a positive country that we can’t hold any tension inside of us, we want the show to land somewhere that feels okay to everybody. British audiences are perfectly happy sitting in the mess at the end. Which is lucky, because that’s where this show lives (because America is a mess right now).
Awareness of ADHD has been increasing over the past few years, but there is still a long way to go. What do you think is the most common misconception about ADHD?
I think the biggest misconception is that people with ADHD can’t focus. We can toooooootally focus. We can hyperfocus on something for hours on end, better than neurotypical people (if they even exist; have you ever met one?). The problem is that I am not totally deciding what my brain is focusing on (low executive function), my brain is deciding for me. So I might hyperfocus on something completely useless for six hours (my Minecraft resort) and then be totally unable to focus enough to read a paragraph of something that actually matters (writing this interview question response). It’s not an inability to do something, the capacity is there, it’s just a steering problem. The engine is incredible, but you just have limited input on where it’s pointing… which, if I’m honest, is a pretty good description of what the crowdwork show feels like.
Do you have any projects lined up after the Fringe that you would like to share?
I do!! After recording the performances for release as full specials on my Youtube channel, I’m launching The Lemon Show! It’s a live streamed late night talkshow wherein I’ll be hosting, having musical guests, a house band, and friends of all stripes dropping by; actors, musicians, artists, and certainly comedians. All filmed in front of a live audience. I’m jazzed, should be fun.
If you could choose one song as the soundtrack for your shows, what would it be and why?
Honestly, it might be either ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’ or ‘All Lost In The Supermarket’ by The Clash. Should I stay in America? Should I leave? I’m caught in a consumer culture that’s trying to give me an identity while the whole sensible world I grew up in is (sometimes literally) crumbling around me. I’m a huge fan of The Clash and always have been (maybe an influence from some of my British cousins).
ADHD: A Crowdwork Comedy Show and An American Comedy Show That Quite Possibly Might Be Funny to the British, both performed by Brendon Lemon, will be performed at Nineties at Laughing Horse (6:10pm) and Just the Tonic – The Caves (9:30pm) respectively as part of Edinburgh Fringe.
Words by Ellen Leslie