Nick Dalton has a laugh at this season’s Altitude comedy festival in Mayrhofen
“I snowboard so slow it’s impossible to injure myself – I got passed by a glacier,” chortles Andrew Maxwell, Irish, big bearded and wearing lederhosen.
Dylan Moran
The audience, several hundred strong, roars in the near-midnight, subterranean club show in the party-loving Austrian resort of Mayrhofen.
It is part of Altitude, the Alpine comedy festival, three events a night for five days, that celebrated its 16th birthday at the start of April.
It’s an extraordinary week, with founders Maxwell – a TV regular on shows such as Never Mind the Buzzcocks and Mock the Week – and Marcus Brigstocke, who has been in everything from Have I Got News for You to the Python stage creation Spamalot, central to the star-studded proceedings.
Also central is the Hotel Strass, the festival base next to the town’s main Penken gondola, big, stylish and always one for entertainment.
Hotel Strass
Evenings (far from just ski jokes) start here with shows in the Sports Bar. Some days featured the Improv Allstars, fast moving stuff from Whose Line Is It Anyway? veteran Stephen Frost along with Comedy Store Players regulars Andy Smart and Sally Hodgkiss and Ireland’s Ian Coppinger. On another, Brigstocke and Rufus Hound reprised their team captain roles in their TV quiz Argumentitude.
Then the contemporary Europahaus hall hosts the big shows. This year that meant headliners American Rich Hall growling and stomping around, Dylan Moran offering a thoroughly surreal performance, bizarre jokes as he accompanied himself with jazz chords on the keyboard, and the giant Emmanuel Sonubi chronicling his former life as a bouncer. Brigstocke, Maxwell, Hall and co joined with a string of other names on the bills (the rule being no two appearances using the same material).
Marcus Brigstocke
Everyone watches from long trestle tables with plenty of beer and wine before wandering up the main street for a late night show in the Strass’s Arena club, some names the same but plenty of others too.
By day there’s a mountaintop Easter egg hunt and silent disco but also plenty of jollity in the Strass, star names wandering about in their bathrobes, splashing in the pool and warming up in the sauna.
Brigstocke laughs at the festival’s early days, which were in the somewhat calmer confines of Meribel. “France was probably never going to be the right fit,” he says, with visitors hungering for dinner in their chalets rather than a comedy show.
“There’s a photo of Maxwell and myself in a swimming pool on the day after the first one when we finally worked out just how much money we’d lost – but the turnaround was extraordinary, we nearly hit break-even the next year.
“One of the reasons we lost so much was us insisting it had to be a bilingual festival, not just a lot of loud brits. We booked loads of French acts who cost far more than we did.
The Europahaus hall is the venue for the big shows.
“And then the first was under a big top and we got spring snow, a bad mix, so we had to pay the fire service get it off twice a day, and heat it too.”
But the sitcom scene changed swiftly… “Comics were queuing up and we’ve introduced well over 100 to skiing and snowboarding. Even those who didn’t take to it loved the mountains – and those that were ambivalent didn’t get asked back!
“Here in Mayrhofen it feels like a village. People come every year and do all three shows every night. Comedy post-skiing is a perfect fit, all these people experience this wild day out and then get to laugh together.”
Brigstocke is both skier and snowboarder. “I used to ski then had an injury that meant I couldn’t wear ski boots but could wear snowboard boots, then I snowboarded, then I did a celebrity Ski Sunday racing event with Graham Bell that got me back in it, first time I’d skied in 12 years.”
Then came his downfall. “I did The Jump TV series on Channel 4, slalom, downhill, skating, skeleton bob, everything. I snapped my cruciate ligament, bad, bad injury, the damage meant I stopped skiing for eight years.”
It’s only in the last year or so that he’s been back. “If there’s no off-piste I tend to ski,” he says. “If there is I tend to snowboard, a perfect week for me is half of each.”
Meanwhile Altitude eases into one of the season’s other major festivals, Snowbombing, the rave music extravaganza, also based around the Strass, with comedians joining the bill.
Late season is party season in Mayrhofen whatever you fancy…
Altitude (altitudefestival.com) dates 2024 tbc. Inghams (inghams.co.uk) has seven-night holidays at Hotel Strass (hotelstrass.com) next season from £1,299pp, half-board. Snowbombing (snowbombing.com)
Rich Hall
Categories: Austria