Claiming to 'hilariously' address the issues of high-school and create a helpful guide, Memorial High School from Houston Texas have come to the Fringe Festival with their show entitled The High-Schoolers Guide To The Galaxy. However, unlike its namesake it is neither a helpful guide nor is it funny.
The show effectively breaks down into a series of 'chapters' that are intended to take high school apart piece by piece with two narrators providing the audience with commentary on the scenes and advice with how to negotiate them. As a premise, it is one that has a lot of comedic potential, so it is therefore a shame that none of this is realised.
The first chapter is a guide on to how to deal with gym class, involving a loudmouth gym teacher who has no emotional depth barking at various hapless students to 'run it off'. Unoriginal doesn’t even come close to how often this trope has been used and even by repetitive standards this was a bad one. This was swiftly followed by a skit about how to dress which could have been taken straight from Mean Girls, the message being either conform or risk being ostracised. Positive stuff. This procession of rehashed film and television ideas from the last twenty years continued, taking us through dating, fights (containing a particularly heinous David Attenborough impression) and a grouchy lunch lady who felt like she had been ripped straight from The Simpsons.
Whilst this stereotypical comedy is bad, it wouldn’t have been such an issue if the narrator's commentary on the skits had been infused with even a semblance of humour. There was a moment right at the end of the play where I thought that they had actually made an interesting and surprisingly self-reflective point. The on-stage characters whom the narrators were supposedly advising throughout said that the guide was useless as all it did was make them more scared of high school. This goodwill was quickly washed away, however, when the whole cast immediately broke out into the Harlem shake. Excellent for bored office workers and Youtube addicts, not for the stage at the fringe festival.
This show was bad; not because the jokes were and always had been unfunny, but because they have been told so many times before that they have lost all comedic value.
