Douze

This show is dumb. Beyond dumb. It’s basically half improvised, and rehashes the same joke so many times over it’s ridiculous. But goddamn if that one joke isn’t so funny. Eurovision is an inherently ridiculous concept, which seems rife for ridicule, but if you think about it, it’s hard to highlight the ridiculous nature of Eurovision unless you go at it from the outside. What better way to do that then to show us a few Eurovision hopefuls who are so laughably untalented and unlikable that you can’t help but bust a gut laughing at that ridiculousness.

If you don’t like comedy of repetition and stupid things, you will not enjoy it. But I did.

Xnthony (Pronounced X Anthony) and the Penny Slots are a set of three Eurovision hopefuls, and have been for at least 13 years. Despite their failures, they refuse to give up, and keep touring the world trying to get people to support their bid, and they’ve now reached Edinburgh. The show is for the most part a set of nine terrible pop songs, all of which try to play into the Eurovision tropes. There’s the political song, the show stopper ballad, the dance song, and the song that uses random props for some reason. There’s also a song where they count to one hundred. And it might just be the best of the bunch – it was definitely the audience favourite when I saw the show. This is all propped up by the performers, who are all truly awful people. Xnthony is a self-described deluded pop star, who wants nothing but the spotlight, but has done nothing to deserve it. The Penny Slots, Tiffany and Hannah, are a singer and dancer respectively, who want the exact same.

The show basically sets up this same gag again and again. Xnthony and crew sing a terrible song leads into Xnthony and crew being awful to each other leads to an audience interaction leads into another terrible song. And maybe I’m an idiot, and this isn’t very funny at all, but it’s so earnestly, eagerly performed and so ridiculous to boot that I can’t help myself but laugh. This show is for sure not for everybody, if you don’t like comedy of repetition and stupid things, you will not enjoy it. But I did.