Emma McAlpine reviews the big bill London sketch night.
One of the most exciting new clubs to appear in London last year, Sketchercise has been putting on some fantastic character and sketch line-ups, all held in quirky Shepherd’s Bush venue Ginglik. Created by comedy duo James Allnut and Dave Simpson, the night has steadily increased in popularity - people are even standing at the back tonight.
The hosts have a strong dynamic, especially when Allnut plays the straight man to Simpson’s clown. Their intermittent sketches get better as the night progresses, with a clever twist on Winston Churchill’s famously droll quips and a guy trying to organise his stag party, Alex Ferguson style.
New sketch duo Dregs are brimming with energy and potential but don’t quite go the distance. One sketch involving two northerners giving a seminar about lying begins well and the pair’s accents are spot on but with no sign of a coherent joke, it fails to hit the mark.
The Great Brain Robbery are a five-piece troupe with some clever ideas and neat punchlines. With a little bit more development needed on a few sketches, they are certainly ones to watch. Jess Ransom performs two characters tonight, including Geordie bounty hunter Tania Law, who comes across as rather one dimensional. Her second character however, the endearingly geeky Caroline (complete with a disturbing breast-massaging tick and comical Hitler impression) is much more interesting.
Two of the best solo acts of the night are Ben Target and Doctor Brown, who unfortunately are billed one after the other. Unfortunate that is, because both have similarly experimental routines and both even happen to use a German sausage as a prop, although I expect this is pure coincidence.
Wearing a rabbit hat, complete with bunny ears, Target immediately incorporates an amusingly creepy persona, remaining silent for the first few minutes and drawing uncomfortable laughs from the crowd as he leers at a woman in the front row. When he moves on to massage the head of a man in the audience, throwing his head back and groaning in delight; my friend and I collapse into giggles as the erect bunny ears also flop down in mock-ecstasy. A simple visual gag but absolutely hilarious. He ends his lo-energy set with a crowd surf attempt. Target deals with any doubters beautifully: “Just in case you were wondering...yes this is happening.”
Doctor Brown is equally unexpected and even harder to describe. Every time I’ve seen him, he’s produced something different and extraordinary. He is brilliant at doing standard comedy genres really badly from improv scenarios to bungled magic tricks and lame prop-based comedy. Pretending a German sausage is various different objects from a lemon to a baseball bat could have been spectacularly bad, but Brown’s weird character (and high-pitched American twang) helps to pull it off, producing that much sought-after audience reaction: initial titters, followed by full-blown belly laughs. He slightly loses the crowd when involving a member of the audience who isn’t up for his games, but you win some, you lose some. When it works, the payoff is worth the gamble.
2010 Edinburgh breakthrough act The Beta Males Picnic live up to the hype. Combining darkly comic scenarios with a notably slick pace, they breathe new life into the room. One mad scientist sketch involving swans that had been nailed together and ‘Steeple Bears’ (a church steeple/grizzly bear hybrid) is delightfully absurd and has the room in hysterics. They may be called the Beta Males but this is certainly an alpha performance.
January Witherspoon, a new character from The Sunday Defensive’s Jacob Edwards, needs more work. Resembling Rorschach in a trench coat, 40 denier balaclava and a Trilby, he gets off to a promising start with one or two okay one-liners but tails off into a series of woefully bad jokes and puns. This kind of anti-comedy works when it only forms one element of the act (see Brian Gittins), but after a while, it loses momentum as the crowd loses interest.
Considering how many acts have been on the bill tonight, barely any have disappointed, and with plenty of new material being tested out, one or two misses isn't suprising. Giving a platform to up-and-coming, interesting comedians, combining light with shade, Allnut and Simpson have produced a winning formula with Sketchercise. And I live locally, Hurrah!
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