Here’s the secret to ensuring your Edinburgh debut is a success: accrue 15 years’ experience before performing it. Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher have written for SNL, piled up 50m online views and won sketch awards in the US. This maiden fringe outing, directed by the standup Alex Edelman and arriving in London this week, shows what the fuss is about. There are no bells and whistles – it unfolds with the easy swing of improv. The razzle-dazzle is all in the ideas, the jokes and the show’s intricate construction, as the sketches interweave with the story of their performance, and both are taken in surprising directions.
The story of this performance is that Kocher has taken a vow of conjugal abstinence until his wedding, but that wedding has been indefinitely Covid-delayed. The resulting sexual frustration keeps threatening to hijack, and soon overwhelm, the show. This is not a credible conceit, and – as Kocher tries to snog McElhaney and molest the audience – can feel out of step with the sophistication of the material elsewhere. Or so I thought, until a late development invites one to consider these libidinous goings on from a new angle.
In the meantime, we get sketch after high-quality sketch here, all of which have multiple jokes at play simultaneously. You can enjoy their wild west saloon-bar skit as a story of a marriage proposal gone weird, as a send-up of low budget multi-roling in theatre – or as an uncertain apologia for BriTANick’s non-diverse casting. Elsewhere, a dating scene recalls how factual arguments were settled, or not, before smartphones, and there’s a twisty number – very much in the Pythons or Sheeps lineage – set in a clinic for bad memory. Another spiralling sketch takes the chef’s-kiss gesture and spirals into ever more rococo ways of miming enthusiasm.
Throughout, the pair crack wise – as is standard for thirtysomething sketch acts – about their career inertia, a joke lent heft by the fact they’re performing (in Edinburgh at least) in a shipping container. But BriTANick’s experience – their effortlessness and efficiency, their unshowy way with one another – is a real asset here, in this chef’s kiss of a fringe debut.
• At Soho theatre, London, from 31 August to 3 September.
