Comedy twosome Freya Parker and Celeste Dring are back with more off-the-wall sketches and impeccably observed characters.
Crazy Sexy Fool is totally refreshing.
Crazy Sexy Fool feels like playtime on speed. Indeed the show opens with Parker and Dring in enormous furry bear heads snorting a pound of white powder – coke “generously provided by the Arts council”, Parker informs us. The next hour is a cartoonishwhirlwind of parody and pop culture, featuring a host of characters that manage to be both absurdist and totally spot on.
The sketches broadly inhabit a sphere of broadcasting and performance, and all the self-consciousness that goes with it. Both performers clearly consume vast quantities of the media they lampoon, and their parodies are affectionately ludicrous. Among others we have popstar-cum-vlogger Frisky Nugget and her producer Dirty Trey, an American news anchor and his long suffering colleague, and a pair of YouTube sexperts (‘Chelsea’s answer to the Olsen twins’). It’s like watching TV with the saturation on full. In any other hands it could be broad-brush, but Lazy Susan are able to skewer recognisable characters in a way that avoids the obvious target.
There’s a howlingly-accurate pisstake of American public radio podcasts like Radiolab and the significance they bestow upon inane subject matter. Parker investigates a man who has cut off both his hands with the help of his son - ‘he already had post traumatic stress disorder from a previous incident so it was fine.’ There are some absolute gems in the throwaway lines, some of which are lost on the audience, but the show is so packed that it doesn’t matter.
No one’s left out of the parody parade, least of all Dring and Parker. The duo live it up hugely as caricatures of themselves, Dring an attention-obsessed performer urging us to stay true to ourselves (“but not like that”), Parker her dopier down-to-earth best friend.Recurring moments where she zones out and dances with a papier-mâché horse are cataclysmically funny, and form the basis of a satisfyingly surreal throughline about a pony trafficking ring. The pair are clearly having a fantastic time. Celeste Dring snorts as she exits the stage after a shocking one-liner about a tumour – and it’s totally infectious.
These are smart, self-aware sketches executed with enormous style: Crazy Sexy Fool is totally refreshing.
