A standup career can endure – but the lifespan of most sketch groups is mayfly brief, often over before it’s really got going. The more so nowadays, with few outlets for the artform beyond the fringe stage. Sheeps feel like they’ve been drawing the veil since they first burst out from behind it, 15 festivals ago. This year’s offering The Giggle Bunch (That’s Our Name for You) will be their last, they keep telling us – a bit more than they need to, in my view. Maybe that’s just because I regret it. At their best, which The Giggle Bunch sometimes approaches (see a post-apocalyptic scene with an unlikely David Brent cameo), there’s no act in comedy more thrillingly, mind-expandingly funny.
This first show for six years is assembled, they say, from the off-cuts of several abandoned sets: one about their dads, one addressing the culture wars. Sheeps-watchers will know not to take a word they say seriously – but maybe this origin story is true, and accounts for the lack of connective tissue here, any framework beyond this being their swansong. Perhaps that’s a factor in one or two sketches feeling more than usually obscure, as if an act always given to twisting sketch into elusive, unconventional shapes has abstracted it beyond the need for punchlines or significance. As Liam Williams intones here of one sketch supposedly generated by AI, “the true meaning remains a mystery”.
But, more often, they deliver fantastically rich routines, full of wild juxtapositions and out-of-the-blue ideas for what sketch might do. The opening scene, starring Daran Johnson as a woke-phobic dad, opts to linger after its punchline to see what becomes of its supporting characters. Later skits splice together two Damon Runyon-ish Noo Yoik crap-shooters with (for no apparent reason) a Yorkshireman who sells dog names, and find Keir Starmer (in Al Roberts’ droll impersonation) mediating between a psychotic clown and its terrified victim.
Not for the first time, there’s a musical number that combines half-assed showbiz pizzazz, oversharing content and Williams’ non-mellifluous voice to hilarious effect. If this is the end, Sheeps are leaving us on a high, if not at their peak.
• At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 25 August
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