So once again the Fringe Festival Programme has launched in a supernova of excitement and anticipation – this year with three different potential covers, and an online version, and an audiobook and a goods lorry to help you to get it back home. And once again the main thing being exclaimed by the Fringe themselves was a celebration of the fact that despite everything there are still 17% more shows this year, still without a word as to why this is necessarily a good thing.
Every year the festival feels this maniacal compulsion to return Bigger & Better, as if the connection between the two were somehow implicit.
But what this does mean is that the Edinburgh Fringe Programme Drinking Game can itself return BIGGER AND BETTER in a new a new double-plus awesome 2010 Edition.
For those unaware of previous incarnations the Fringe Programme Drinking is pretty spectacularly simple. It’s like Russian Roulette, but with alcohol and intensely bad PR blurbs.
A) Flip to a random page of your fringe programme.
B) Let your eye drift to the name of a show.
C) If in its brief blurb you spot any of the following – you have a drink.
1) One drink any time someone uses three nouns in a row. [e.g. a tale of lies, horror and deceit]
2) One drink any time two of these nouns are metaphysical and one physical. [e.g. a tale of love, heartbreak and a park bench]
3) One drink for each for any brackets, ellipsis or exclamation mark in the show’s title [e.g. “Once upon a (Christmas) Time in… Wakefield!” = 3 Drinks]
4) One drink for each use of internet speak anywhere in the copy. [LOLZ, ROFLcopters, WTFs, OMGs, FTWs, Fails etc.]
5) One drink for each item in a list. [e.g. One Woman. One man. Two Days. 1000 problems. = 4 drinks]
6) One drink for each of the following: multimedia, darkly comic, one man, fringe favourite, sex, spellbinding, disturbing, slick, unpretentious, seductive, site-specific, tragicomic, physical, zany.
7) One drink for each additional production of the same show that is also on.
8) One drink for any review pulled from Three Weeks, Chortle, or any review site that has .com on the end of its name.
9) One drink each for any mention of the following: the world cup, Hitler, Shakespeare, duck houses, Alice in Wonderland, the end of the world.
10) One drink if the accompanying photo features a man in period costume looking serious.
So there you go. This is, of course, a work in progress. Please feel free to add your own additional rules in the comments and we’ll update as we go.
Have fun.