Theatre

The First Supper

Alan Hindle | Wednesday 17 August, 2011 10:46

There’s a lot of satire of satire and ‘clever dick’ writing in Expeditionary Force’s show, The First Supper. I love clever dick writing. Wordy sketch comedy keeps Oxbridge graduates out of the City and other such criminal enterprises, like politics. Gets those Bullingdon Clubsters off the streets. Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie took clever dick writing to nosebleeding heights with A Bit of Fry and Laurie, but they used their gigantic brains to formulate new, exciting ways to say ‘bum’. They were making silly sketches in which you could see their intelligence- but they were, first and foremost, funny. Genius applied to goofiness.

Expeditionary Force, on the other hand, seem to demonstrate their education for its own sake. Unspooling balls of sesquidalia like mouth yarn, it was impressive how many big words they could fit into sentences, even if they don’t have the chops to pronounce everything clearly. Their funniest (and, admittedly, brilliant) sketch was about Mr Men author Roger Hargreaves being raked over the coals by his publisher over his recent efforts failing to match the glorious heydays of Mr. Tickle. The lame and historically inaccurate Byzantium sketch, meanwhile, was lame and historically inaccurate. Normally I wouldn’t care if a comedy sketch about the ‘Other Roman Empire’ is strictly correct, but if the point of the sketch is to show off erudition at the expense of laughs, and it’s wrong, then I get to crap on both. To be fair, I should mention the audience enjoyed The First Supper heaps, but they may have only been encouraging the lads to keep them out of pinstripes and balaclavas.

Camden Fringe Festival page

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