I'm glad your show was a success. How are you coping with the post-Edinburgh blues?

I thought the Corpses Edinburgh line up was better than the real one. And I went to the real one and it was generally rubbish. The cardboard Nicholas Parsons was undoutably the highlight!

In all seriousness Omid Djalili was really brilliant.

THE LAWRENCE SUSPECTS
Venue 19 - Hesitant, 60 The Hesitant Tickets 5562098
The men accused of murdering black teenager Stephen Lawrence return to their first love - stand-up.

Could anything at the real Edinburgh have been funnier than the contradiction between the above joke and the opinions expressed by the corpses in their spat with Richard Herring?

Psst: It was o'hanraohanrahan.

Rob S -

see, I told you that one would come back to haunt them.

Yes, look, it has a sheet over its head and is saying 'Wooooh Wooooh, quite amusing but still arguably could be misinterpreted as direct racism by a plebian audience who aren't comedy-literate enough' in a scary voice.

Jon - that's the most delayed and ineffectual 'I told you so' I've ever heard. God, you're unbelievable.

Peter O - read the Fringe Guide again (before it disappears in a day or two). The Lawrence Suspects is part of a running joke about completely inappropriate people 'returning to their first love - stand-up'. It's not a race thing. It's just a bit of juxtoposition between the gushing PR and the acts it promotes. Could just as easily have been the Yorkshire Ripper appearing in a musical or Nirvana singing about pantyliners. Same sort of joke I mean. You could accuse us of not taking the Stephen Lawrence affair seriously. We'd argue that if we didn't think it was serious in the first place then it wouldn't have worked as a flippant joke.

You've deliberately missed the point of our arguments over Time Gentlemen Please. But that's cool. Pretty much everybody else deliberately missed the point too. We never said that Al Murray's character shouldn't be racist, just that they should check their audience and not pander to a pleb mentality. Al doesn't do racist jokes anyway. He does jokes about the French and the Germans. Reference comedy akin to making jokes about Keith Chegwin la la la la la la la.

This site is aimed first and foremost at an 'intelligent' readership. We try to approach it in a way which we wish the industry would approach its comedy output - ie not worry that there may be some people out there who won't understand bits of it.

Now fuck off the pair of you and stop trying to stir things up. That's our job.

>You've deliberately missed the point of our arguments over Time Gentlemen Please.

No, it was an accident.

>Al doesn't do racist jokes anyway. He does jokes about the French and the Germans. Reference comedy akin to making jokes about Keith Chegwin la la la la la la la.

Surely he's *parodying* such referencing? (although I haven't seen it, so I'm in prancing in piss here.)

>This site is aimed first and foremost at an 'intelligent' readership. We try to approach it in a way which we wish the industry would approach its comedy output - ie not worry that there may be some people out there who won't understand bits of it.

Hang on, hang on, the contradictometer is currently spewing ribbons of hot shit into the sky like a pleased anus.

You say Herring should "check his audience" (presumably by making them sit IQ tests) to make sure their are clever enough to understand ironic racism/dodgy references and laugh in the correct knowing manner as befits a comedy-literate compulsive essay writer.

But then you also think "the industry" should "not worry that there may be some people out there who won't understand bits of it."

As the Minister for Ships struggles to pursuade these two viewpoints to form a coherent argument, it's back to you in the studio, Chris.

Or have I lost the news?

YOU'RE confused?? I'm industry, and I'm supposed to do something which doubles back on itself and disappears somewhere close to the lower intestine. (Or Croydon, whichever comes first).