7 hours ago
9
With sketch comedy not exactly cresting a wave in the UK right now, why not import some cult-favourite exponents from the other side of the pond? If that were the thinking behind this fringe debut by NYC four-piece Simple Town – well, it might just be smart, fresh and funny enough to revitalise the form. It’s sketch with something of the energy of improv, a hint of an easygoing get together with your coolest friends (OK, far cooler than my friends) – and the kind of freewheeling, elusive-logic comedy with which Sheeps have in recent years sustained sketch’s flagging pulse.
Identified as “four teens in their 30s”, Simple Town introduce themselves as they mean to go on: super-casual, faux-naive, coming at one another, and at our expectations, from odd angles. Their first sketch takes us back vaguely in time, to three Nasa bros aghast that a woman has been recruited to their space programme – because “she can do multiplication in her head!”. Like later scenes, this one contains several movements, the borders porous between them, the comic point forever evolving and slipping beyond your grasp.
If you like that sensation, of laughing without ever fully pinning down why, Simple Town are your new best friends. What’s going on in the skit that pairs two cagoule-clad spare thumbs left alone together at their respective partners’ reunion? This dotty choreography of social awkwardness extrapolated ad absurdum is as beguiling as it is barely explicable. You could read their firing squad sketch as a brilliant riff on the polarised US, where fierceness of conviction is matched only by woolliness of argument. It’s also just a nugget of Pythonesque nonsense about dopey executioners.
Some routines are simpler, like the solipsistic inner monologue of the audience member whose suggestion is accepted for an improv scene. Or like the show’s closer, burlesquing middle-class American reverence for old Europe – although even that one morphs halfway into a four Yorkshiremen-style race to the bottom of US education. It’s all accomplished with artless slacker panache by Will Niedmann, Caroline Yost, Felipe Di Poi Tamargo and Sam Lanier, posting a welcome reminder of how exciting team comedy can still be.
At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 24 August
