Review of The Great Puppet Horn

"Worthy of a TV show" by Maxine Gallagher for remotegoat on 12/04/10

You may have seen the Fringe posters: "Hilarious, if you see one thing in Edinburgh this year, make sure it's this ***** (mum)" "never laughed so much in my life, a must see ***** (best friend's cat)". Then you go to this hysterical piece of innovative comedic theatre and the funniest bit is when it ends and you can go to the bar.

This, sadly, is often true when it comes to adult puppet comedy. Puppet Grinder, while it had its moments of brilliance, was a disappointingly tepid affair, busily garnering half-hearted chuckles from cute-puppet-doing-something-rude humour. Funny once, not for a whole hour.

Thankfully, The Great Puppet Horn deserves its many accolades: "Here was magic, Sunday Times" "One to watch, The Stage". It's a genuinely hilarious hour of silly, topical and, yes, irreverent paper foolery.

Once I'd got over the fact that the guy on the left actually did look like Evil Roger Federer (I heard you, people in the row behind me), I was immediately swept away on a ridiculous but wonderful journey with the violent pedant that is Grammar Cop. I know all too well the troubling conditions of misplaced-comma and bad-spelling anxieties, and to feel that someone else understood was welcome therapy.

One fast-paced sketch followed another. How could you not fall in love with Bipolar Bear? And the short but sweet Tetris sketch was a stroke of genius. Yes, they were liberal with toilet humour and terrible puns, but they somehow got away with it, perhaps because they also combine these with weightier political issues like the election and Afghanistan.

If it looked messy, it was calculatedly so. To pack an hour with so many sketches, all tightly scripted, and to extract a constant stream of laughs is not an easy task. Much harder than they tried to make it look.

I found myself taken back to the days of Spitting Image, French and Saunders, Fry and Laurie, when TV comedy was quick and clever and sarcastic and very funny. There was a feeling of Cambridge Footlights about it. Two friends with more than their fair share of intellect devising sketches in the pub and then daring each other to perform them on stage. I couldn't help thinking that we'll be seeing a lot more of these two - and at the same time feeling hopeful for the future of adult puppetry in the UK.

Event Venues & Times
finished	Little Angel | 14 Dagmar Passage, Cross Street, London, N1 2DN

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