There are actually plenty of comedy options at the Fringe if you want to avoid the ‘affable young bloke in jeans and a t-shirt telling jokes’ but perhaps none further removed than Paul Foot, a weird old bloke in a silver suit who, for an absurdly brilliant hour of comedy, doesn’t really tell any jokes.
Beginning with a baffling and non-sequential routine about cucumbers, Madame Tussauds and beekeepers, the audience naturally assumes this will settle into some sort of sense sooner or later. It is not until you realise it’s not going to that you can appreciate the skill of this show.
It is such a random routine that it appears Foot himself doesn’t really know what’s happening next. He is full of nervous laughter and checking the ‘prompts’ on the table: ‘There was a famous rooster…’ he begins then, after flicking through his notes, ‘Sue Johnston!’ discarding the rooster never to be mentioned again. That is until, as an unnecessary reassurance that he is in fact more or less sane, he ends the show with a demonstration that it was all planned. Even if it isn’t – and I have no doubt it is – the chaos is superb; on getting stuck on a rambling anecdote he checks the script to see how it ends and, after a long pause, announces ‘Yep, I more or less covered it’ to the delight of the audience, increasingly happy to play along.
His stage manner is unnerving but electric. He is not still for a moment and on several occasions gets a little closer to an audience member than they are expecting, but his buffoonery is intoxicating. It is certainly not to everyone’s taste and there were one or two bemused faces, but Foot has an impressive knack of keeping his off-the-wall humour under control. His disturbed threads of imagination will unravel for long periods but never for too long, suddenly changing direction with a single word; just as the show seems to be falling into disarray, he reels the audience back in with a goofy smile and a more down-to-earth, self-aware quip.
There are moments that are misjudged but that is inevitable in such a whacky routine. Not once can the audience predict where this master of randomness will take them next and it is an hilarious ride.
