{"id":2098,"date":"2017-07-02T17:35:55","date_gmt":"2017-07-02T15:35:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/?p=2098"},"modified":"2017-07-02T17:35:55","modified_gmt":"2017-07-02T15:35:55","slug":"the-plothole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/?p=2098","title":{"rendered":"The Plothole: It’s dry, but you can laugh"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Stuart Cairns and Westley Cockrell are actually quite funny, sort of.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Working in a bookstore can be detrimental to your mental health. Particularly for writers.<\/p>\n

Surrounded by all those stories, their promising beginnings and neat endings, which are published, there, on the shelves to be seen and bought, is a constant slap in the face. A daily taunt of one\u2019s own unpublished status.<\/p>\n

The irony is that it is only aspiring writers who would ever subject themselves to the drudgery, low pay and superciliousness of bookstore customers, which is why bookstore staff are notoriously rude. It\u2019s a guaranteed path to misanthropy.<\/p>\n

Look at Dylan Moran\u2019s character Bernard Black in Black Books<\/em><\/a>. You thought the sitcom was fiction. Ha! Moran isn\u2019t such a grumpy shit anymore of course. He\u2019s famous now. Which only makes aspiring writers and comedians like Stuart Cairns, who still works in a bookstore, even more embittered and misanthropic. I don\u2019t know what his sidekick Westley Cockrell\u2019s excuse is, but this also makes Cairns a good comedian (irony alert II) and given that bookstores rarely have customers, he has time to get hold of someone like Cockrell and dream up shit like The Plothole<\/em> because if one doesn\u2019t have a book of one\u2019s own, the next best thing is to find fault with the books that mock you from the bookshelves every day of your working life.<\/p>\n

And while a publisher has standards, almost anyone with the ability to meet some sort of deadline, access to an employer\u2019s wi-fi and lack-of-money as a common-law spouse, can book a stage on the Fringe.<\/p>\n

The lack-of-money situation is also why Cairns and Cockrell\u2019s The Plothole<\/em> has cardboard cut-outs as props. Guys can\u2019t even afford a bottle of Tassies. No, they cut a bottle shape out of an old box and write \u2018cheap red\u2019 on it. Eish! It\u2019s a miracle they found their way to Grahamstown, these okes can\u2019t even find their white privilege.<\/p>\n

But they\u2019re here. Which is a good thing, because they\u2019re actually quite funny. In a dry, ridiculous sort of way.<\/p>\n

Just the fact that their show is billed under comedy but is not sexist, homophobic or racist, and elicited at least one laugh from me (many more from the midday audience of teens and twenties) puts it in about the top five percent of comedy shows on the Fringe. If Cockrell didn\u2019t corpse for some completely obscure reason, it would make the top three percent.<\/p>\n

Bear in mind I just made those percentages up. I don\u2019t even know how many comedy shows there are on the Fringe, having chosen that section of the programme to try keep a fire going and halt the onset of severe hypothermia.<\/p>\n

Put it this way: if you can read and understand this review and know the difference between hypothermia and hyperthermia, your parents must have read to you as a child, in which case, you probably wander into bookstores now and again and disturb people like Cairns from plotting their future fame; you\u2019ll understand what The Plothole<\/em> is about, and probably even laugh, possibly quite often.<\/p>\n

If not, go watch Stef the Hypnotist.<\/p>\n

The Plothole is directed by Rob van Vuuren and is on at the National Arts Festival until Saturday 8 July. Book here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Working in a bookstore can be detrimental to your mental health. Particularly for writers. Surrounded by all those stories, their promising beginnings and neat endings, which are published, there, on … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2101,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[10,11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2098"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2098"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2098\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}