Independent on Sunday , 10-Aug-08

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Pappy's Fun Club, promises dark, cynical, edgy comedy. But no. It turns out that the name is very nearly sincere, and that the Fun Club's members are four clean-cut, studenty young men in jeans and T-shirts who bound through their freewheeling sketches without a moment's pause, except when they crack up at each other's improvisations. The Clubbers have been a tad over-hyped. With their joke-shop costumes and home-made cardboard props, they're more of a feelgood Fringe favourite than an outfit on the verge of major stardom.

But it's a positive sign for their future that their inspired absurdism is so distinctive: in various sketches, the performers are required to play a blue whale, the internet, the bubonic plague and the city of Nottingham. They also have the dubious honour of being fonder of male semi-nudity than any sketch troupe since Monty Python.

Nicholas Barber

Original link: www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre/reviews/...

* The IOS has a system of man-in-chair icons instead of stars. We got man-sitting-attentively-on-edge-of-chair, the fourth of five. Go figure.