From the country that gave the world fjords, A-Ha and open sandwiches comes Lars and Martin with their stand-up comedy act Norwegians of Comedy. Splitting their hour-long slot into four parts between them they both try and, unfortunately for all, fail to deliver comedy with a distinctly Scandinavian feel.
From the start of the show it was obvious that this was not going to be a tour de force of comedy as they repeated their entrance 3 times before stating that 'next year's show entrance would be funny'. Next year's show was an unwelcome running theme for much of this year’s one. Lars kicked proceedings off with some 'self irony' comedy. He started well enough but soon began to drag as his jokes about being tall and wearing his mum as a second skin started to stray from surreal into just plain weird. Too often in this first set he tried to joke about how unfunny he was when no one laughed at his jokes, a gag that works once or twice but unfortunately for Lars was a trope of his humour. His second slot was noticeably better and, dare I say it, the best of the show, as he hit on jokes about being a nurse and the size of his face. But whilst it was better it was not by any stretch of the imagination full of laughs.
It is at this point that I should tell you that Lars was the funny one of the duo. Martin had a much more slapstick style and relied much more heavily on how his accent made English words sound to get laughs. Despite this he did hit on a couple of jokes, such as the idea of an allergy restaurant, but due to the sparsity of laughs generally he flogged it so hard that the horse became glue. His second set saw no improvement as he talked of vagina elves and indie Hitler, two topics I would never have thought could occupy the same space. It was however in this set that he received the biggest laughs, as he utilised a recording app on this Iphone to create a 'drum and shit' song- a genre I hadn't heard of previously nor wish to again.
This is far from the worst comedy show that I have seen and if you love how Norwegians speak then this may well be the show for you. For the rest of us however it too often drifted into the realm of tedium. But hey, there’s always next year’s show.
