The best thing about this Late Night Gimp Fight offering – the sketch group’s first in four years – is the musical numbers, the first of which gets the show off to a great start. Performed to an upstage video, it finds “head gimp” Lee Griffiths living a life of mid-30s domestic tedium, before submitting to temptation and reassembling the old team for one last, gimp-mask-clad hurrah. But can you still sell puerile shock-comedy when you’re middle-aged? I enjoyed the song, welcomed the honesty about the quintet’s predicament – and hoped it foretold a new depth where once there’d been just crude gags about smut, death and sexual deviance.
But nope: it’s the same brand of smut, sexual deviance etc as way back when, albeit with bigger production values. It’s been hailed as a triumphant return by some, including the two women next to me in row J, convulsed with delight throughout. Are they buying the Gimps’ brand of juvenile humour at face value, or is there some ironic register at play that I’m missing? Either way, these first-base gags, predicated on the inherent funniness of masturbating and soiling oneself are lost on me.
That’s partly because the Gimps aren’t all charismatic performers. It’s also because the jokes are always explicit; there’s seldom subtext or nuance. At a press conference held by a kidnapped boy’s parents, the joke is that the dad is secretly jubilant. But he barely bothers trying to keep the secret, robbing the taboo (on which the joke depends) of its power. Elsewhere, the beginning and sorry end of one skit is in the idea that a vampire might be killed with a stake not in its heart, but up its arse.
There are better sketches – a structurally dexterous one withholding the unexpected reason for a man’s psychotic behaviour; a daft one about a Tinder date surgically grafted to her former lover; and a dance sequence based on a man’s relationship with a stepladder, which relieves the profanity with some oblique silliness. The Gimps are always better the further they depart from callow shock tactics, or when performing their spoof boyband numbers – which sometimes swing at conventional targets (Trump, Kim Kardashian) but have spectacle and droll wordplay to recommend them. “She needs to seek help,” runs one number about a racist girlfriend, “she only wants to sieg heil.” Their show has its moments, but navigating between them can be hard work.
- At Soho theatre, London, until 6 January. Box office: 020-7478 0100.
