The Laughing Horse Free Festival happens in the back rooms of pubs that were pouring pints before the Fringe existed. The Wee Room and Maggie's Front Room at The Three Sisters. The Nineties room at The City Cafe. The Main Cellar under West Nic Records. Flight Club in the West Port Oracle. The Attic and the Lounge at The Counting House, the Basement Bar at Boston Bar, the Cinema Room at Brass Monkey. None of them were built for comedy. That is most of the point.
Free entry, bucket at the door on the way out. Nobody has bought a ticket, which changes the room completely — an audience that paid £18 will sit politely through fifteen minutes of nothing, because they've already spent the money. A bucket crowd will not. They walk. Comics working these rooms know it, and it makes them faster and meaner with their own material. You can hear the difference in the first ninety seconds.
The scheduling is genuinely absurd. On one Thursday in August, six shows start inside a 35-minute window: Three Bad Sisters at 1:25am in the Nineties room, Sex! with Becky Fury five minutes later in the Wee Room, then Toxic Femininity, Struan Logan: Chaotic Good, and more, stacked back to back across a few blocks. That's not a suggestion to plan around. It's an argument for not planning.
Nobody is curating this for a mainstream crowd, and the bill shows it. Alingon Mitra's Clean Cuts and Elliot Wengler's Jokemon go character-led and referential. Almost 50 AND a Woman and Grandad & Me Do Stand Up Comedy put people on stage the Fringe brochure usually forgets exist. Dr Jimmy: First Steps Into the Gay-niverse and Wiki Knows Best – The Rest Is Islands are comics working one specific seam rather than doing crowd-work with a clock on it. And then there's 100% F***ed Up and Far From Home Comedy Showcase and Comedy Striptease, which are what they sound like at 1am.
Where prices exist they sit around £5. Five or six shows for the cost of two pints.
Most of this runs past 1am, and that is the actual filter — not budget, not taste. This is the leg of the Fringe that starts after the paid venues have emptied. The crowd is drunker and the comics are looser, and both of those things cut in both directions. Some of it will be bad. That is the deal you are making, and it is a fair one at this price.
Rooms and slots move night to night in a festival like this. Check the date before you walk across town for it.