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The Mash House
Aug 11-13, 15-27 (15:45)

Morituri Te Salutamus

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Where does Patrick Susmilch’s debut Edinburgh Fringe show truly belong. Definitely not in the comedy section – which is a shame because its bill’d as such, & he is in fact a stand-up comedian from Minnesota & California. The reason I say that is, well, the spirit to which the British biorhythm connects to it’s native soil has never really made light of the passing of one’s friends & family – especially eight of them, & his pet bird, in a short span of years, which would leave most of us clinging to a bottle of xanex, watching constant boxsets & downing endless bottles of baileys. The British just don’t do nerfgun salutes.

“If anything I should have put more boobs in the presentation.”

Not Patrick, however, who has fashion’d quite a spectacle of 469 rapid-fire slides to accompany his tales of loves, lives & mournings – but knowing that at any given moment one of these nice people he is introducing us to via photographs & screenshots of texted conversations is just about to die, is all a tad too morbid for my humour wells. The experience is rather like watching a farmer walk thro a field of cute lambs, plucking them out one-by-one for the market. It’s very difficult to laugh at that kinda stuff.

Watching, however, this hard-hitting compendium calmy & compassionately, is a different story. There are some funny moments here & there, & Patrick is an excellent performer, but overall Texts from my Dead Friends is too curveball for comedy. Saying that, I do believe that for people dealing with their own grief, this is an excellent thalepeutic (portmanteau of the muse of comedy, Thalia, & therapy) production. Loss is hard, coping harder, but there are solid ways of empowerment to escape the sludgy soup of depression & emptiness that losing a loved one incurs.

“I’m tired of feeling like a ghost haunting my own life.”

By the end of Patrick’s sermonesque coping mechanism I think I figur’d out what was actually going on. One of his closest friends in life & on the circuit pass’d away, & I feel that he’s crafted this rather remakable series of epistolary laments as some kind of gesture to him. An interesting hour indeed, but going in expecting comedy is not something one should hold in anticipation when approaching this show.

Damo