Jigsaw are three standups gathered to perform full-pelt sketch comedy. You'll see better acting in the primary school nativity, and there's zero experiment with sketch-show form. But what you get with Jigsaw are performers who radiate enjoyment and ease with a crowd, and a hell-for-leather pace that means – however corny the last gag – something amusing is never far away.
The performers in question are Tom Craine, Nat Luurtsema and Dan Antopolski. Contrary to the current fashion, the trio makes no play of the relationships between one another; nor is there any meta-comedy about their experience of putting on the show. There's hardly time: Jigsaw deliver one skit, or animated one-liner, hot upon another, with the funnies shared equally between three equally confident, equally high- (or low-) status comics.
It makes The Fast Show look languid. Which is just as well, given the creakiness of some of the jokes. One sketch in which Antopolski trains an audience member to slaughter livestock is mere preamble to a "choking the chicken" double entendre. Wordplay is a trademark: a disembodied ear is "eerie"; a request for the bill in a restaurant elicits the theme tune for a certain well-known TV cop show.
It's cheap, but it's always cheerful – both for the giggling performers, and an audience giddied into willing submission. And there are defter jokes, too. A recurring gag about a resting actor at work in telemarketing leads to a big pay-off, there's a choice visual gag about a wife removing her makeup, and a dopey/intellectual sketch in which the philosopher Schrodinger's children open their Christmas parcels.
Jigsaw aren't going to revolutionise sketch comedy. But the kids-with-a-new-toy excitement of these moonlighting standups delivers a reliably amusing late afternoon.
