Brent Weinbach: Appealing to the Mainstream

Amid possibly the highest concentration of comedy wonks anywhere on Earth, a show like Brent Weinbach’s (four stars) should thrive. It’s comedy about comedy, from a man who looks like he’s never laughed in his life.

Weinbach is feted for his strangeness back in the States, and by way of introduction to Edinburgh, he sets out to distinguish himself from his more marketable peers. He tells us he was once banned from a standup club for being “off-putting”, and it isn't hard to see why.

But if you ask him, his obscene, deadpan absurdism is far less objectionable than the mass-appeal bilge he mimics and corrupts. Cue a caricature of Def Comedy Jam misogyny that mutates from a “white people be like...” routine into an Inception-style layering of a half-Filipino guy doing a black guy doing a white guy doing a black guy. Later, he subverts the everyman observational shtick in a similarly mind-bending way.

It’s conceptually clever, yet often puerile in execution: experimental, hinting at intelligent points, while also having the crowd form an a cappella fart orchestra. Thus the message that Weinbach is different is rigorously backed up. He likes to wrongfoot us, to bend mime and dance and language bizarrely out of shape.

In his defiant bid to be as weird as he likes, Weinbach marches purposefully where more cautious comics fear to tread. He tries on accents that many would worry seem racist, as with an internal dialogue where the voice chastising him for his self-indulgence is, for some reason, Indian. His female-focused crowdwork, meanwhile—where “I’m not going to touch you” is technically true—would be too creepy for some. It’s Weinbach’s poker face that saves him here; any hint of a smirk and it would come across as “look at me, I’m being transgressive”, but instead it’s just a sober demonstration of what it looks like when you excuse yourself from the rules.

Near the end he states, as if it were necessary, that he doesn't like “jokes you have to get" – he’d rather chase laughs we can’t explain. If you're a standup sitting idle between shows, or just a comedy fan who'd like to see the form put through the mincer, it’s an endeavour that demands your attention.

That is, of course, if you’re not already going to see Sheeps (four stars), an equally inward-looking sketch show that runs at the same time. Now a few years into the game, the ex-Cambridge Footlights trio are putting those well-schooled brains to good use, with a selection box of genre parody that sends up virtually every performance type around.

The premise, laid out during an arch bit of housekeeping, is that the boys are soon to play at Wembley. It’s the gig of their lives, and they’re gracing Edinburgh with the chance to see material being workshopped before it’s unveiled to 90,000 fans.

But each time they attack the stage with boyband gusto, they stumble over the first sketch and reset. Something’s not right with ‘Night at the Aquarium’. For a start, it lacks a punchline. They’ll have to try it in every conceivable style and configuration – a game of theme-and-variation that grows increasingly absurd.

Past shows have established Sheeps’ fondness for a self-referential breed of sketch whereby everything comes with a commentary. They pause for post-skit appraisals, and it’s rare to see them play a part with any regard for sincerity. This shifts focus from the play to the players and, as personas go, they’re on to a winner. The vision of tetchy Northerner Liam Williams clashes with that of haughty artiste Alistair Roberts, while sweet, stupid Jonno (Daran Johnson to the taxman) is like the only child in a broken home, wishing everyone would just stop fighting.

This year we get to see that dynamic stretched over a framework that at once fleshes out the three characters and produces amusingly amateurish pisstakes of improv, musicals, horror, mime... the count starts to blur around 15.

Part of what makes it so impressive is that they begin with such basic raw material. Aquarium worker Iggy (Liam) wants to knock off early for his birthday, but arrogant meathead Todd (Jonno) won’t cover for him, leaving him to mope with his mop and the sinister jellyfish (Al) that’s floating stage left. And that’s it.

After refashioning the scene into heavy-handed political allegory and tongue-twisting farce, each Sheep gets his own signature version. Liam’s patchy redraft, written angry and drunk at 3am, betrays a broken heart, while Al’s is just an excuse to hog the stage. Jonno’s sickly-sweet rendition mocks his own role as the lovable simpleton.

This all amounts to a postmodern take on the old story of creative differences breaking up the band. It’s clever and insiderish, yet with enough goofiness to stop it seeming smug.