Trygve Wakenshaw and Barnie Duncan @ Underbelly Cowgate

Hot Chips is an hour of joyful mime-clown improv from Trygve Wakenshaw and Barnie Duncan

Review by Emma Sullivan | 12 Aug 2025
  • Hot Chips

Hot Chips duo Trygve Wakenshaw and Barnie Duncan promise 'a brand new show made right in front of you', and each night, bouncy and fleet of foot in vest and shorts, they pick out new sketch ideas from a notebook.

For the uninitiated, this is mime clown improv – and it's joyful stuff. The pair's physical styles are beautifully complementary: Wakenshaw with his long limbs, held stiffly straight; short and curly Duncan, arms and legs shaping arcs. One skit in particular – 'Gregorian Fart' – showcases these physical qualities, with Wakenshaw as the gloomy monk and Duncan the billowing, endlessly recurring fart. It's the standout skit of the show which has at least one member of the audience weeping with laughter. The Great British Bake Off skit is another beauty, with contestants Shirley Tits and Mr Nob vying for success; Duncan's precise, deft gestures set against Wakenshaw's lolloping limbs.

In conventional improv, words and meaning are foregrounded, but here it's more sculptural: a pattern or shape arises and a response is made. Wakenshaw collapses in an extravagant heap after a collision with the mic, face smeared on the floor, bum high in the air, and, responding to the invitation, Duncan swoops in with a stool and slides it next to Wakenshaw's bum. One skit does play very effectively with language, as the pair try to sell 'Spartacus', a new app that promises the world, their improvised wordplay satirising the absurd overreach of tech entrepreneurs.

It's such a pleasure to watch people playing and experimenting in a space, and to watch men playing like this is a particular joy, when the norms of masculinity are so confining. Imagine this as required viewing for adolescent boys, part of a curriculum for an enlarged physical vocabulary. Hot Chips reminds us again of the utopian quality of clown – the body fully acknowledged and enjoyed, not pushed to one side as an embarrassment or a mere vehicle, but as the main event.


Trygve Wakenshaw and Barnie Duncan: Hot Chips, Underbelly Cowgate (Big Belly), until 24 Aug, 11.10pm, £12-14