The Scotsman: Can chess be funny?
Chess is the world’s fastest growing sport. Jay Richardson talks to the comedians using it as gambit in their stand-up.
Stand-up Kevin James Doyle has been teaching chess for 12 years. “No-one thought it was a cool job until now,” he grins. For a pastime that emerged in the 6th century, he observes, “it's really having a moment”.
The world's fastest growing sport, chess has lately been immortalised in Taylor Swift's lyrics, inspired hit Netflix drama The Queen's Gambit and remains the default arena for pitting Artificial Intelligence against the human brain. The BBC airs competition format Chess Masters next year, while the number of players exploded during the coronavirus pandemic, with the game becoming the most downloaded app for iPhones, even as millions seek out chess streaming channels online.
Launching his own YouTube channel shortly, in which he interviews fellow comics over a game, North Macedonian comic Vlad Illich ventures that “chess has always reflected culture”. Growing up in the volatile Balkans at the millennium, teetering on the edge of civil war, everyone in his family played, alongside neighbours and “taxi drivers, waiting for customers, they'd get a board out.” His idol was the grandmaster and exiled Kremlin critic Garry Kasparov.
But can this cerebral, resurgent Cold War symbol also be funny? Well, two years ago, the world's best player, Magnus Carlsen, accused his opponent, Hans Niemann, of cheating. Reports allege that Niemann took instruction from a vibrating electronic device lodged in his rectum.
Storytelling comic Doyle reflects on this scandal, and the tale of The Mechanical Turk, a so-called automaton built in 1770 that beat Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin, as part of his show. Tutoring harder than ever to fund his third festival, the American is finding that his latest hour, After Endgame, is his most appealing so far.
“I got excited after putting my poster on Instagram because people were connecting much more than with my previous shows,” he explains. “I feel responsibility though because it's such a beloved game and there are expectations.”
With a few references for “mega nerds”, Doyle draws attention to chess in the work of such varied pop culture icons as Ingmar Bergman, Bob Dylan, JK Rowling and Wu-Tang Clan. But you don't need to play to appreciate his hour. The show hangs on a “traumatic” account of financial skulduggery. After he was hired to teach Singaporean billionaires last year, he found himself in a metaphorical “chess match with someone who wasn't who they represented themselves to be.” His antagonist played “a very good game that I wasn't aware was being played … until it was too late.”
For inventive, leftfield comic Nate Kitch, chess underpins Tomorrow Might Not Happen; Now, his solo Fringe debut. The Englishman freely admits that his room-splitting act “isn't for everyone”, and “at my worst, I treat the audience like an opponent” and conventional stand-up with “contempt”.
A freelance illustrator, his props are “always black and white. And there's a main anchor point of the show about the Black Square [artwork] by Kazimir Malevich. Sometimes I put it on the floor and stand on it.”
He pictures each show like a match. “I've all the pieces, all the form and I know there's an endgame,” he explains. “But it's about how I get to that. Sometimes a joke is sacrificed early on, because that's the way it's going. Whereas next day it could become the focal point the show builds around.”
“Pretty woke”, but otherwise offensively-minded, Kitch argues that while it was once considered “avant garde” to put bishops on the wing, it's now mainstream strategy. And that routines frequently develop after you've “thrown caution to the wind”, with joke-writing dependent on misdirection and surprise as much as abiding by rules and formula.
“I'm a gambit man” echoes Illich, who changed his show title, The Slav Defence, to the punnier Vladislav, Baby Don't Hurt Me. “Traditionally, chess is about controlling the centre with pawns. But my impulse is to destroy the centre and work on open lines. It's riskier but allows more creative patterns.
“It's like how we map jokes. The premise is like a puzzle and the punchline can only work with the information you've provided for the joke to make sense, just like how the board is limited to 64 squares and there are certain pieces.”
When engaging crowds, he says, “if you ask a question, you've usually prepared Plan A or B but when they hit you with C, you adapt”. Doyle features interaction in his show that changes each afternoon. “It's always said: 'think at least two steps ahead'” he observes. “But in stand-up, as in chess, you need to respond. You can't just stick to a script.”
Kitch attributes his refusal to creatively compromise or accept failure to learning chess from his grandfather as a nine-year-old, and never being allowed to win.
Illich, a member of Prestwick Chess Club after studying acting in Scotland, was formally taught by a war deserter, until NATO patrols outside their house prompted his family to flee to Malta. But by then he'd played with his family since he was six.
His grandma “was very, very good” at the Alekhine Defence but “called the knights 'donkeys'”.
However, after 27 years, it was finally beating his father, “who loved his bishop openings”, that gives Illich's Fringe debut its emotional core.
Before his father developed schizophrenia, the comic had only perceived chess “in terms of winning”. But playing as a cognitive exercise for his parent has “reinvigorated” his passion, “helping us reconnect.”
The game offers “bottomless enjoyment, pride on the line as you engage your brain creatively,” Doyle enthuses. Challenging all-comers on Edinburgh's streets to publicise his show, he's also playing Illich daily, with the latter acknowledging his “obsession” and “addiction”.
Kitch carried his chessboard last year whilst flyering his show with Caitriona Dowden. Spotted by stand-up's closest thing to a grandmaster, Simon Munnery, he was asked if he fancied playing?
“So we'd have a pint and play. He battered me, I beat him once. My ideal Fringe would be just doing my show then having a game afterwards.”
Kevin James Doyle: After Endgame, Just the Tonic at the Caves, 5.05pm, until 25 August; Vlad Ilich, Vladislav, Baby Don't Hurt Me, Pleasance Courtyard, 8.30pm, until 25 August; Nate Kitch: Tomorrow Might Not Happen; Now, Gilded Balloon Patter House, 5.40pm, until 26 August
