{COMEDY} Sketch shows
EDGE OF darkness
The new breed of sketch acts are dressing up as gimps, being banned by TV and writing sick routines that will never be made public. As Brian Donaldson discovers, being shocking for its own sake only gets you so far
W ith the near-veteran likes of the Penny Dreadfuls and Pappy’s opting not to appear in their collective forms this Fringe, it’s a golden opportunity for some of the newer sketch acts to make a mark. But with ever-increasing competition at their level, how do these groups get themselves noticed? Cunning viral campaigns? Frenzied flyering? Or do they go for the jugular with hardcore material to grab headlines and entice the curious bystander?
Last year, Late Night Gimp Fight! attracted a mixed bag of reactions for their full-on sketch fare, which featured unusual takes on the Psycho shower scene and the Oliver Twist begging bowl, while gags about paedophilia, nudity and violence were in plentiful supply. Yet they also had the gall to throw in some Beckett, a tactic that flew over the heads of those baying for more ugliness. ‘We don’t mind testing taboos though we don’t set out to do that,’ insists David Gimp (real surname Moon). ‘We were a little surprised at being described as the darkest sketch group on the Fringe, but then it just seemed that the darker stuff tended to be funnier and we’re not going to hide away from it. But there’s an instinct about going too far, and if it’s shocking for the sake of it, then it won’t go in.’
Certainly, Moon bristles at the memory of their show (which received a Best Newcomer nomination) being dubbed as ‘lowest common denominator’ comedy. ‘Ultimately there will be some reviewers who just won’t like our stuff and that’s fine, but why come to a show with that name? What were you expecting?’ That’s a question that Sarah Campbell, one half of Christmas for Two, must have asked when a sketch she penned for a BBC Three pilot show called Laughter Shock was rejected on the grounds that it was, weirdly, too shocking. ‘They specifically commissioned me to write something shocking and I thought, “Well, fair
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enough, I can write to a brief.” They said they loved it and that they would film it but at the very last minute, the BBC cut the sketch because it was too much for them.’ The upside of that frustrating experience was that Campbell met her Christmas for Two cohort, Amy Hoggart, who appeared in the scene that presumably now lies in a BBC vault marked ‘toxic’. Happily, it will receive an airing in Edinburgh, but the pair don’t want to be viewed purely as merchants of filth. ‘I’m naturally a prude,’ insists Hoggart. ‘I think my stuff is weirder and Sarah has to really edit it. But when something is quite rude, I always just giggle at it quite shocked but I want it to stay in. I’ve worked it out so that Sarah always has to say the rude word. And I look about 15 so I need to be consistent. But if people come to see us looking for something shocking, they’ll be massively disappointed. It’s more of an odd characters hour.’
Characters and oddness spilled out from all sides when Steve McNeil and Sam Pamphilon unleashed their debut sketch affair last year, entitled Addicted to Danger! There was material about religion, terrorism, rape and race, but at no point did you ever sense you were in the presence of terrible, awful people.
After all, as McNeil puts it, they have a pretty solid benchmark from which they analyse every joke or scene. ‘The acid test is: could Jim Davidson perform this at an adult panto?’ If the answer is a resounding and confident ‘no’, then it has a fighting chance of making it to the final cut. If the answer is ‘yes, quite possibly’, then it joins the pair’s litany of regrettable experiments. ‘If anyone questions anything Stewart Lee has said, you feel confident in your own mind that he could turn round and say, “I know why I’ve said this, what my intention is and where it has come from,”’ says Pamphilon. ‘We have files of scenes that we can’t justify came from a good
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