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PAPPY CHRISTMAS EVERYBODY!
Above Three & Ten, Brighton
Pappy's Fun Club shouldn't be as good as it is:
a shambolic four-man troupe, grinning, corpsing
and occasionally improvising their way through
an hour and a half of Christmas-based sketches,
songs and silliness. It's all bound together by
a thin and perfunctory narrative, and then rounded
off by an earnest, jokeless song about how nice
Christmas is when spent with people you love.
And yet, in the intimate surroundings of this
new venue, the audience blithely sang along to
the second round of the song, charmed by the joyous
anarchy of the previous ninety minutes.
The Fun Club (Matt Crosby, Tom Parry, Brendan
Dodds and Ben Clark) first started to get noticed
in this year's Edinburgh Festival, where they
won the attention of the national press, received
excellent reviews, and were nominees for the prestigious
if.comeddie award for best newcomer.
The hype is justified: through the combination
of their unaffectedly cheery tone, the chemistry
they share and, above all, the clever and inventive
writing, Pappy's Fun Club have created an atmosphere
in which laughter thrives.
In this special Christmas version of the show,
the sketches are tied together, albeit loosely,
by a simple story: Brendan hates Christmas and,
via the Ghosts of Christmas Past (a singing minstrel),
Present (a hippy) and Future (a somewhat deranged)
robot), the rest of the Fun Club contrive to change
his attitude.
They corpse; they mock each other's mistakes;
and their props are cheap (the Black Knight's
costume is a child's plastic sword and a black
cardboard tube with eye-holes, while the aforementioned
Robot from the Future is Tom in boxer shorts with
a golf club, some tin foil and a can of coconut
milk taped to himself). In most shows, these would
be flaws. But Pappy's highlight and revel in them
with such charm as to make them a crucial part
of the show.
This explicit self-awareness is what defines
them, but it wouldn't be so endearing were it
not for the quality of the writing. Underlying
the anarchy are four sharp comic minds. The sketches,
with only a few exceptions, are well-conceived
and well-written. And, by virtue of the members'
good spirit and judgement of a room, when anything
doesn't work they only need to acknowledge it
to bring the laughter back.
Pappy's Fun Club is clever without being arrogant,
cheerful without being over-earnest and shambolic
without being self-indulgent. But most of all,
it's fun: uncynical, spirited, festive fun.
Jess McSchmesh
Original link: www.remotegoat.co.uk/review_view.php?uid=1027
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