The Cambridge Footlights (King Dome) have a lot going for them. Poise, brains, clean-cut looks, nice accents and privileged status at the Edinburgh Fringe as keepers of a sacred flame. But in reality these advantages count against them. Audiences know that comedy comes from a paranormal neverland, from damaged grotesques, from halting, slobbering outsiders. Comedy is unpleasant. And these boys are anything but. So it takes them a while to convince us that they’re the real deal and not some artful muck-about from the college quad.
Their comedic sources are obvious. Movie spoofs, workplace mix-ups. And much of their material defies current political orthodoxies. A joke about the Jamaicans not being able to muster an army feels distinctly weird. As does a sketch about a Swedish masseur who turns out to be a gay rapist (but the way he pronounces the initial ‘k’ in ‘knuckles’ is a delight.) There are, however, some great visual gags here and one or two brilliant sketches. A posh dad desperately ingratiating himself with his son’s teenage friend: ‘Do your parents let you freebase crystal meth at home, Josh?’ It sounds like a meagre haul, two or three winners from a 60-minute show, but it’s a pretty decent start. I expected very little from these boys. And I loved them.
Edinburgh speciality: off-beat titles to pull in the punters. I Fed My Best Friend Her Favourite Cow (Gilded Balloon) is James Sherwood’s bid for a mass audience. It attracted 27 paying customers at the show I witnessed. Not bad. Sherwood is a varsity wag who sits at a piano and analyses the lyrics of George Michael and Queen as if they were essays in moral philosophy. Erudite, cuddly and undemanding, Sherwood has developed an hour’s worth of beautifully phrased routines which are ideal for the high-brow English bourgeoisie. Beyond the Home Counties (and Edinburgh is the Home Counties in August) it’s hard to see where his appeal lies. My guess is that he’d like to play stadiums. He needs to change his material or his ambitions.
Pope Benedict: Bond Villain (Pleasance Courtyard) is the come-hither title of Irish comic Abie Philbin Bowman. He warms up the crowd with a gag about suicide bombers. ‘Their numbers are falling all the time.’ Then he turns to the royal family. ‘The Queen’s realised the only way to save the monarchy is by not dying. Once Charles takes over, everyone’ll be on Facebook asking, “How do you spell guillotine?”’ The meat of his act is the collapse of the Catholic Church’s authority in Ireland. And it’s a fascinating topic if you’re predisposed to be fascinated by it. Too often he lets his anger and his rectitude overpower his sense of comedy and he seems more an Enlightenment pamphleteer than a nightclub funny man. With his puckish, earnest, savage wit, he puts one in mind of Bernard Shaw. Perhaps stand-up is the launch pad for a wider calling. He’d be excellent on Question Time.
I doubt if they’ll book Phil Kay (Free Hash!, Laughing Horse @ The Hive), though. He must be the most charming lunatic born. When I saw him on TV, I had him down as a shaggy-dog merchant, like Ross Noble, who uses charm and hyperactivity to disguise a lack of material. But Kay has a well-polished act and it’s this he conceals beneath a cascade of delinquent non-sequiturs. His look is wondrous, messianic. He wears the Oxfam cast-offs of the super-rich. He’s tall, gangly and underfed, with a mad beard, ungovernable hair and nervy eyes that stare from hollows of warmth and mirth.
He sits and thrashes at a battered guitar to give a kind of acoustic architecture to his streams of chaotic observation. ‘The riots, the riots,’ he warbles, ‘the distant riots. Best kind of riots. Distant riots.’ Then out comes a rehearsed line, ‘Women love the smell of recent Hoovering.’ Then more about the riots and this unsung, conversational aside. ‘We’re Scottish. We don’t need a riot to tell the government it’s shit.’ Inexplicably, this is hilarious. Having seen him on stage, I now understand why I didn’t get him on TV. Kay has a magic, an angelic indignation, that doesn’t survive being translated into any other medium, including this one.
After midnight, I caught a free gig featuring female comics hosted by Sajeela Kershi (Laughing Horse @ Espionage). She does ‘audience participation’ which is widely loathed because it misreads the first line of the contract: the entertainer will entertain the audience not vice versa. She kept picking on me, too, but I found her quips entirely forgivable because the woman is simply a treasure. Magnetic, lovable and enormously witty, she’s like Claire Rayner scripted by Kenneth Williams. As the crowd left she held out a collection tin for the other acts. ‘No shrapnel,’ she chided, as a punter threw in a 20 pence piece. ‘Folding money only!’ Which doesn’t make her sound that charming. But believe me, she is.
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