Jack Barry, Brett Goldstein and Norris & Parker on sex and comedy

Jack Barry

You know more about Jack Barry's sex life than you think.

As we discovered in our Glasgow Comedy Festival interview with Mae Martin earlier this year, it takes three to tango. Martin had introduced Jack Barry on stage as someone she'd had a threesome with, and now the man himself returns to Edinburgh with a show all about sex: "I do talk about Mae in the show, but I wasn't going to say her name," he says. "Maybe I should now if she's blabbing about it all over town! You've opened a can of worms here."

While this might sound like part of a comedian's hedonistic lifestyle, the threesome was arranged after Barry and his partner had been talking about their relationship. "My girlfriend is Argentinian – which is why the show is called Tango. I feel like she and I are really on the same page and comfortable talking about different kinds of relationships with each other. We'd spoken and wondered if an entirely monogamous relationship is entirely the way to go and it was after that conversation we thought a threesome might be an idea. So we asked Mae; that's how that came about."

However, Tango starts not with his relationship, but with a couple Barry now knows far too much about. "The premise of the show is that I've been talking to my parents a lot about sex and relationships. They were being a bit tense with each other in their marriage and asked me to be a counsellor."

This sounds awkward for all concerned, but it made fiscal sense. "I don't know if it's just for frugality, that they didn't want to pay a professional. My mum is a psychotherapist and maybe, like doctors making the worst patients, she didn't want to see another therapist. They wanted some impartial person and rather than paying someone they decided to use me.

"I've been reading The Ethical Slut and The Polyamory Handbook. I have been doing a lot of research into sex, on different ideas for relationships and on the idea of staying with one person for your entire life, who is going to have to deal with all your needs – it feels like a bit of a big ask. And I'm talking to my parents, and looking at their relationship, and realising some of the problems you have when you've been with the same person for 30 years."

It appears Barry's affordable, one-man Relate service is working. "My parents seem to be sticking together, they seem to be all right." Though he adds: "I don't think I'll ever be able to look them in the eye again."

Despite the thrust of Barry's comedic routines, Tango is set to be a thoughtful and sensitive show: "It's very confessional and there are lots of stories about my early sex life and losing my virginity. I think by the time the show ends people will feel they know me pretty well."

Brett Goldstein

Also delving into the essence of relationships is Brett Goldstein. It's debatable if this is a sideways move or a departure from his usual material. He describes What Is Love Baby Don't Hurt Me as "me banging on about sex and addiction and porn, but also this time I’m finally talking about relationships so I feel really vulnerable and sick."

The relationship part, the day-to-day, is usually something hidden when we tell stories. And Goldstein offers a fresh reading of a psychological horror film from the perspective of the relationship within it: "My favourite film about love is Don’t Look Now as I think within its drama it shows a loving, functional long-term marriage, something I don’t think we see enough of, we rarely see the middle bit in art. The main bit. We see people get together and we see people break up but we rarely hang out in a positive way in the middle. Marriages are always in crisis in drama, they rarely sit together in a real loving way."

He adds: "The intense highs and lows of 'love' might not be love at all. From the looks of it, real love is calm and steady and not like a drug at all but it’s hard to see contentment for what it is, from the outside it looks dead boring."

The addictive side of love – or whatever is disguised as love – leads to impulsive decisions, as Goldstein knows all too well. "I spent thousands and thousands of pounds to fly across the ocean to be with someone who wasn’t there when I got there. I’m still paying that off in a way."

And we live in a curious time, where many desires can be satiated with a click. Do we live in an era of a digital gateway to the pleasure garden, or does the internet lead us awry? "Yeah, I think the internet has done us a right mischief. It's set us all off on the search for dopamine hits from the wrong places, from getting likes and swiping right and we are in danger of living in a photoshopped fantasy land of resentment and self-loathing. Best to get Kim Kardashian to do as she promised and actually break the internet then we can see if we can actually look at each other in real life with no filters and learn to live with the discomfort of really being known.

"Or wait for the sex robots to become sentient and let them fuck us all to death and take over the world."

Norris & Parker

While being fucked to death by sex robots sounds a fitting end for humanity, Norris & Parker are talking about a more persistent sexual threat as they come back to the Fringe after a year hiatus ("we like to take a year off to go to rehab"). The threat is female desire and seems best embodied by the persecution of witches. 

"We're setting it in a town called Phallus Ridge where all the cliffs are shaped like penises," says Katie Norris. "There is a threat of sex witches causing havoc amongst the town. We're setting some of it in past Phallus Ridge, medieval Phallus Ridge, and some of it in the modern day."

Sinead Parker adds: "The League of Gentlemen is a huge inspiration for us. That's how we met, became friends, talking about it. We like how it is all set in the one place. We're setting this show all in the one world. Before, our shows have been sketches with mine and Katie's storylines throughout."

Both artists have been through break-ups in the last year and expect their own lives to "seep" into Burn the Witch. The other influences on the show are more unusual and include the film The Witch and a treatise called Malleus Maleficarum. The latter was written in 1486 by Henrich Kramer, a German Catholic, and crystallises the mindset prevalent during the witch trials in the 17th century. 

Parker explains that treatise puts forward ideas that: "Eve came from Adam's rib, so women are weak, and when women cry they are trying to ensnare and deceive a man. And ambitious women, all lusty women, are all linked with witchcraft. And it has parts about how women are all fucking the devil, but disguised as farmyard animals. They were forced to confess and really it was men just projecting their own weird repression onto women."

It is not only thematically that Burn the Witch is Norris & Parker's most ambitious hour: it also features an original score by pianist Huge Davies ("He's terrified of us"). What's more, they tell us: "We might do a sex witch dance in the show" says Norris. Although this remains under discussion: "We'd have to get a proper choreographer," jokes Parker. 

The pair are seeking the right props for the show too: "We've asked someone we know who makes props if they can make lots of prop penises" says Morris, "that we want to put in jars," says Parker, finishing the sentence. "Because that's also in the book, about women stealing men's penises, and lots about penis sizes."

A prop penis in a jar maybe isn't the sort of thing they want to be walking across Pleasance Courtyard every day, but they both seem to relish the idea: "Yeah, they'd be lots of male comedians shrivelling up."

Jack Barry: Tango, PBH Free Fringe, Globe Bar, 4-24 Aug, 8.30pm, Free
Brett Goldstein: What Is Love Baby Don't Hurt Me, Pleasance Courtyard (Beneath), 1-26 Aug (not 24), 7pm, £6-12
Norris and Parker: Burn The Witch, Pleasance Courtyard (Beneath), 1-26 Aug (not 4), 10.45pm, £6-9.50