Fat Tongue
Fat Tongue return to Edinburgh, and provide a lot of laughs, but don't do justice to their huge talent
| 08 Aug 2007
Billy Elliot, apparently, is the gayest aspiring lap dancer one is likely to encounter. Where do you put your money, Billy? "In my pantsss," he parrots sleazily. Of course, true Elliot fans – John Prescott for one – will easily brush off this sniping at their favourite child hero, leaving the perpetrators with the egg of obvious comedy on their faces. It's this sort of crassness which lets Fat Tongue down.
But Billy Elliot's mincing is not a timid toe dipped into Fringe waters, but a group returning to Edinburgh after their 2006 nomination for an if.comEddie award. Sophie Black, Seb Cardinal and Dustin Demri-Burns's confident use of the performance space they earned last year speaks of three experienced performers. This isn't a bunch of university-educated chums, faffing around on stage and playing up hammy acting for the cackles of slapstick connoisseurs. What is frustrating about the Fat Tongue trio is that these three patently refined comic actors highlight the discrepancy between exemplary performance skills and some of this year's jokes.
The material certainly gets laughs: a sketch which sees tigers showing varying degrees of remorse following a kill is a great idea, if a little overworked. The team's capacity as a class comedy act does sometimes show: their talent for pastiche, moulding absurd situations to lampoon tired or familiar formats is impressive. A middle-class dinner party is uncannily scripted and played beautifully straight given that one of the wine-sipping guests is an alien. After some coy flirting, the husband's disappearance with the Mr Alien is wonderfully surreal sketch-comedy, with a big fat tongue wedged in cheek. Vexingly, this is spoiled by the gay sex noises provided by the soundtrack – a touch clumsy when the perfectly-weighted build up leaves the inter-species homosexuality hilariously implied.
If there's a comedy festival on Earth where a hugely talented group needn't force-feed punch-lines to a dosy audience then it's surely the Edinburgh Fringe. With dancing, acting and vocal skills to overshadow many of their fellow performers, Fat Tongue could, and sometimes do, drag an audience up to brilliantly cerebral satire. They needn't touch base with bumming noises.
But Billy Elliot's mincing is not a timid toe dipped into Fringe waters, but a group returning to Edinburgh after their 2006 nomination for an if.comEddie award. Sophie Black, Seb Cardinal and Dustin Demri-Burns's confident use of the performance space they earned last year speaks of three experienced performers. This isn't a bunch of university-educated chums, faffing around on stage and playing up hammy acting for the cackles of slapstick connoisseurs. What is frustrating about the Fat Tongue trio is that these three patently refined comic actors highlight the discrepancy between exemplary performance skills and some of this year's jokes.
The material certainly gets laughs: a sketch which sees tigers showing varying degrees of remorse following a kill is a great idea, if a little overworked. The team's capacity as a class comedy act does sometimes show: their talent for pastiche, moulding absurd situations to lampoon tired or familiar formats is impressive. A middle-class dinner party is uncannily scripted and played beautifully straight given that one of the wine-sipping guests is an alien. After some coy flirting, the husband's disappearance with the Mr Alien is wonderfully surreal sketch-comedy, with a big fat tongue wedged in cheek. Vexingly, this is spoiled by the gay sex noises provided by the soundtrack – a touch clumsy when the perfectly-weighted build up leaves the inter-species homosexuality hilariously implied.
If there's a comedy festival on Earth where a hugely talented group needn't force-feed punch-lines to a dosy audience then it's surely the Edinburgh Fringe. With dancing, acting and vocal skills to overshadow many of their fellow performers, Fat Tongue could, and sometimes do, drag an audience up to brilliantly cerebral satire. They needn't touch base with bumming noises.