Cough em if they can't take a choke @ Verge

What do you get when two Scotsmen, a Mexican and a Welsh woman spend three weeks together in a gallery space in Govan? Well, a pretty good show, actually. The residency by Jon Thomson, John Nicol, Carla Novi and Gwenan Davies culminates in an entertaining exhibition about identity, experimentation and the nature of humour.

Setting the tone, the exterior window bears an utterly surreal handwritten joke, playing on the aforementioned classic joke prelude and making reference to other clichéd joke lines and cultural stereotypes. Inside, among a jumble of cacti, crickets, comedy sunglasses, cocktails and kissing, the gallery is overrun with impressively stacked towers of beer mats; perhaps a token of the time spent in each other’s company, hours of thinking and drinking.

A number of video works on TV monitors show footage of moments captured in the space. On one, John Nicol sits in the gallery window playing a silly beat on a tiny keyboard to a pattern generated by the unsuspecting public as they traverse the pedestrian crossing. This spontaneous game summarises the general feeling of the show - intuitive and refreshingly playful. 

A second screen shows Carla Novi attempt to tell a joke in her native tongue, but bursts of red-cheeked laughter prevent her from reaching the punch-line. On a third, clad in a Mexican wrestling mask (but an unlikely wrestling candidate), Jon Thompson scales walls in order to combat a static beer mat tower. The looped repetition of these relentlessly ridiculous scenarios gives everyone uncontrollable giggles, and it’s not just because the Govana Libres are flowing.

There is no attempt to draw contrived relationships - instead, the artists start from scratch to produce something that is impulsive and entirely the product of the group as a collaborative entity. It may have only scraped the surface in its investigation into human nature, but it made me laugh. A lot.