A show by Fringe favourites Pappy's Fun Club is a carnival of gaiety. It's silly – but without the laziness or cynicism that can make silly hard to take. This four-strong troupe knows how to charm as well as amuse. Last year, the Fun Club used comedy to head off the eco-apocalypse. Now, the ambition is more modest: they're challenging the world record for sketches performed in an hour. Two hundred is the target; fail to hit it, and the quartet's mysterious benefactor, Pappy, won't be pleased.
The rest of us will be, regardless. The Fun Cub has a steamroller spirit of play, never more evident than when licensed jester Tom Parry cuts loose. Parry's anarchic disruptions and ad-libs ensure that no Pappy's show feels stale, and that the performers seldom stop laughing. Here, he plays a hook-handed villain bent on converting the Fun Club to Quakerism.
Other recurring characters include a hapless dinosaur (doe-eyed Ben Clark) whose stubby arms impede full integration into 21st-century life, and the world's tallest man and smallest woman – summoned from history to advise the Fun Club on the art of record-breaking.
These characters supply shape and storyline – much needed, given that the record-breaking conceit rather fizzles out. But it's a shape that allows for plenty harebrained and irrelevant sketches too, including a dramatisation of the moment when the purpose of ears was revealed.
"You hear through your ears? I can hardly believe my mouth!" Elsewhere, two skittles stage a bank robbery. "This is pin number seven." "I told you not to give out my pin number in public."
Characteristically, the show's best sketch has no purchase on anything, other than joy. It features two old men, sizing one another up. Tentatively, one reaches out to touch the other – and on contact, the electronic parp of a Stylophone is produced. More prods are exchanged, elsewhere on the body, and different notes sound.
Soon they're playing one another like instruments, and something absurd becomes something carefree and musical. It scarcely matters whether Pappy's Fun Club smashes its personal best. On this form, even less than their best is better than most.
