All this month we are speaking to comedian Stuart Goldsmith. After a really successful run at this years Edinburgh Fringe, the comic is now taking his show Canary on the road, his first tour in the United Kingdom for a decade! All this month we are speaking to Stuart about the show, climate change and much more. Today, we talk about tour!
You are currently on tour with Canary! What can you tell us about the show?
Canary is my second solo climate hour, following Spoilers, which won Best Show at Leicester Comedy Festival in 2023. The title comes from the canary in the coal mine, the old early-warning system that’s now mostly a metaphor we repeat while ignoring the actual warning.
The show is about what it feels like to be paying close attention to climate when most of the culture is doing its best not to, and it’s built around confession and hypocrisy rather than virtue-signalling.
I’m not up there as someone who’s got it sorted. I fly, I eat meat, I contain multitudes, and I think that honesty is what lets people actually relax into the subject instead of bracing for a telling-off.
You did a run of the show at Edinburgh Fringe this year as well, how did that go?
It ran for a fortnight at Monkey Barrel, and Edinburgh is the one place where you can genuinely develop a show night by night in front of a live audience, so by the end of the run it was a different, sharper piece than it was on day one.
I got the chance to see your show in August, and one thing I really enjoyed was the way you approached climate change.
You managed to make such a complex and important topic feel relatable and inclusive, without making anyone in the audience feel alienated or talked down to. Is that difficult to achieve when you’re writing a show around such a big topic?
It’s the whole difficulty, really. The easiest way to lose an audience on this subject is to preach at them or to assume they already know as much as I do, since I’ve spent a few years years reading and learning about this and most people understandably have not! So I try to work with what they already understand rather than testing them on facts they don’t.
Mostly I’ve found that if I confess my own worst behaviour first, the flight I shouldn’t have taken, the thing I bought I didn’t need, it stops the show being about their guilt and makes it about something we’re all stuck in together.
How do you warm up for a show?
I go for 5 wees.
How do you wind down after?
I talk endlessly at whoever will listen, or laugh out loud to myself if there’s no-one there, and then sing along to Lonely Island at top volume in the car
Three favourite things to take on tour with you?
A single ripe banana, my friend and tour support Mark Serra, my sweet-ass merch, which is a cardboard stencil of a canary design that people can use to turn their existing clothes into my merch!
Finally what is your favourite thing about this show?
There’s a routine in the middle of the hour that’s the most vulnerable piece of stand-up I do, going from things being fine to everything being awful and back again in a few minutes. It’s officially the best thing I’ve ever written (TM) and I just love performing it
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