The term character comedy doesn't quite cover what San Francisco standup Will Franken does in an underground cave, late at night on the Fringe. Yes, he flits in and out of personas – so restlessly, in fact, that it starts to look like a psychiatric condition. But the vivacity of his characterisations is just an incidental pleasure of this twisting and twisted set, in which the contents of Franken's subconscious – now absurd, now antagonistic – are paraded across the stage. The sharp-clawed satire on US culture and liberal piety, and the constant upending of what it is we think we're watching, make for a unique and compelling hour.
Franken's take on the modern world comes at us in shards and splinters. We scramble for context while our host pursues his own odd logic and obliges us to keep up. Here is Bill Jacobs, the motivational speaker encouraging business to "celebrate diversity", with some key exceptions; here's a campaigner for Parents of Pick-Axe Murdered Children (POPAMC), eager to differentiate her plight from that of other murdered kids' parents. We see multicharacter scenes, too, such as the one with the Victorian prostitutes given condoms to save them from Jack the Ripper. Franken plays all the roles himself: partly, one suspects, because no one else would have the stomach for the job.
The fluidity recalls the Pajama Men, while the darkness of Franken's imagination is like Chris Morris: this is Blue Jam with a wilder look in its eyes. Middle American inanity is skewered: witness the hick who thinks the sun is a UFO. But left-liberal orthodoxies are subverted, too, as Franken baffles conventional thinking on race and imagines the amplify-ad-absurdum charity event Global Massive Earth Existence Day. Occasionally, a scene overruns or a satirical point proves elusive. More often, you can't take your eyes off these inspired outpourings.
