From Mr Bean to Mr Tumble, there’ll always be an audience for unworldly dorks messing up at life for our entertainment. Spencer Jones is this festival’s clown of choice, with an exuberantly silly props-comedy show in which his alter ego, The Herbert, gets a “proper job”. Don’t take that to mean there’s a plot: this is mainly one goofy set piece after another, as squeegee mops sing soul music (delightful), children’s toys say swearwords (not so much) and a latex glove becomes a flying snowman. It’s broad, trad and vaporous, but there aren’t many more innocently funny 50 minutes on the fringe.
You’d guess the nature of Jones’s act before he moves a muscle: most comics don’t wear 15th-century pudding-basin hair, white tights and a foam hunchback. Imagine Quasimodo with a budgie-print top and a disapproving family, and you’re halfway there. Some of the neatest moments depict Jones’s brother, dad and spouse in a series of beady-eyed cameos: lovely little characterisations that break up the goonishness, even if the back-story of a carping wife is predictable.
Given that clowns are often presented as context-free everymen, Jones’s scheme to give The Herbert a hinterland is intriguing. One subplot, about taking his baby to A&E, briefly threatens emotional significance – and even though Jones pulls back (the baby does have a fox’s head, after all), the possibility lingers suggestively. Elsewhere, one precious scene finds Jones touring a nuclear plant with his new boss, a polystyrene bust on a stick constantly getting the hump at Jones’s asides to the audience.
Mainly, though, the show celebrates pointless creativity and the other lives of everyday objects. It’s easy to submit to the pleasure of seeing litter-pickers recast as loudmouths, particularly when Jones is grinning joyfully behind them. “It’s just something to do,” he sings, in a dotty musical finale. But that’s underselling himself. It’s not just something, it’s something delightful.
- At Heroes @ The Hive until 31 August. Box office: 0131-226 0000.
