This is a disappointing show, mainly because the Oxford Revue don’t have that many funny sketches to perform. Over the course of an hour, they spend too much of their time trying to be clever and ‘meta’, and too little time actually delivering funny jokes. Overall, while there are a few funny moments, most of the show proves dreadfully boring and gratuitous, with a number of rather strained and boring transitions between sketches.
When the two players are doing well, they feel like they might be aping in the direction of a Fry & Laurie-styled sketch duo
The duo operates with what one might think to be a surprising amount of confidence, given the dearth of sketches they end up performing. At one point, they even joke about their own lack of material. Perhaps if they’d had an abundance of terrific material, this would have been funny. Instead, the bit got more murmurs of agreement and head-nodding than it did actual laughs.
The audience don’t respond well to much of the Revue’s framing and transitions, staying silent for the most part. One cannot help but think that their show might be funnier had they performed more sketches and shortened the lengths of their transitions. Instead, they spend a too much of their hour pandering to themselves instead of the audience, breaking the fourth wall in ways that were more unnecessary than they were funny. One had to ask who this was for. In general, the audience responded much better to the sketches and songs that the group performed; these are by far the more amusing and interesting bits of their show.
When the two players are doing well, they feel like they might be aping in the direction of a Fry & Laurie-styled sketch duo. A few moments during the sketch portions are very funny, and the audience responded really well. However, as stated above, most of (if not all of) the laughter evaporates the moment that the Revue flee back to their framing device. Again, this is really a shame because several of the duo's sketches are actually quite funny. I wish that they had included a greater number of sketches and that they hadn’t tried to be so ironically clever.
