“And now we begin, as life does, with pregnancy,” Matilda Wnek of comedy duo Beard solemnly says before satanically squeezing segments of a satsuma until she discovers one she’s satisfied with. Such is the influx of oddball and imaginative sketch at this year’s fringe, that by the time your head hits the pillow, the memory of each day plays out like a 12-hour psychedelic trip. Last year, I suggested that something was stirring in the formerly dormant world of sketch. It’s safe to say that, in 2015, the multiple-armed beast is now fully lucid: the likes of Daphne, Sheeps, Massive Dad, LetLuce and more are leading an exciting new generation of innovative comics.
Back to Beard: there’s something magical about Rosa Robson and Wnek, even if a lot of the sketches during A Grin of Love are more like drafts of ideas than fully formed visions. What they succeed in doing during their free show at Sneaky Pete’s is create their own little bizarro, Boosh-like universe. Such is their dedication to goofish clowning, that sketches such as the invisible hat (we have to pretend Wnek’s hat makes her invisible) and the head-lice exterminator (Wnek looks through members of the audience’s hair while Robson enacts the response of the lice on stage) might make for a fantastic children’s show. Bonus points for their music options, too: surely Can’s Vitamin C and Frank Ocean’s Crack Rock have never soundtracked such silliness.
The Pin return after storming the fringe last year. Once again deconstructing the art of sketch with cerebral precision, former Footlights members Alex Owen and Ben Ashenden create a clever hour in which their incredibly complex analysis could be a little too knowing, stuffy or scholarly and BBC radio-like, but is seamlessly done with just the right amount of weirdness. It takes about 10 minutes for the warmth and humour to begin, but once the comedy workshop ignites, there’s a real energy in the room – particularly when we’re only privy to one side of a conversation, such as when Ashenden plays the part of a spirit medium who contacts Owen’s horny dead mum. It ends with a DVD commentary of their show, which becomes so meta it’s close to inducing a mild form of madness.
It feels like early days for brothers-in-law Ed Eales-White and Jon Ponting, who bring Bucket to the fringe. There’s a traditional sketch tale of friendship and conflict – Eales-White the foppish, earnest auteur to Pointing’s high-energy, slightly mindless hunk. Highlights include a sketch about provincial police officers who fantasise about becoming proper cliched TV detectives – falling asleep on a pile of case studies, adopting evere drinking problems, enduring the slow demise of their family life, while the dim Stage Combat Experts demonstrate their masterful ability to deliberately muck up a sentence. Such is Pointing’s physical magnetism, I could have watched a whole hour of his interpretive dance.
Perhaps my favourite sketch comedy of the fringe this year was Gein’s Family Giftshop. Nominated for best newcomer at the Edinburgh comedy awards in 2014, they bring Volume II to the city: a show that feels like being trapped on the backseat of a school bus surrounded by the funniest kids in class. Said kids are Manchester natives James Meehan, Kath Hughes and Ed Easton, who further enhance nostalgia by performing in faded, ill-fitting PE kit. This is mostly scatological stuff, but among the rest of the fringe’s high-concept, political or generally esoteric comedy, it’s a strange relief to watch three friends riff on willies without the looming prospect of a detention.
From the sublime to the grotesque: Twisted Loaf’s ugly onslaught is a cartoonishly slapdash sketch show. Libby Northedge and Nina Smith, winners of the 2013 Funny Women award, rely on shock and sleaziness: an hour of mostly clowning and gurning, the show centres around coke fiend pop star Libby and her single-brain-celled and mostly silent accomplice, Nina, as they scramble and bicker their way to a charity gala. In between, we meet City Boys whose sole means of expression extends only to “Yes Mate” and “No Mate”, revolutionary feminist figures who carry out noble crusading with their “boobies out” and a bit about Sloanes and plastic surgery that I think is supposed to double up as a comment on city gentrification. All of which is done smeared in lipstick, sweat, blood and stomach bile. I’m not sure if it’s the vision of unrelenting drug ingestion or the clammy Caves venue, but I leave feeling sick, disturbed and in need of a lie down …
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