Leads & Stern

Gemma Leader and Juliette Stern are a confident and energetic double-act who deliver short sketches at an impressive rate of knots. Unfortunately, they seem to have forgotten to add the jokes.

The set-up to the show concerns their recently departed third member Davandre who, they mourn, died behind a bin in Princes Street at the start of the Fringe. They vow to carry on without him but, quite frankly, they needn’t have bothered.

Most of their skits are fairly simple affairs, relying on the most basic comic structures to provide the pay-off. In particular, they utilise the hoary pull-back-and-reveal gag countless times – setting up a familiar situation only to confound the audience’s expectations by adding a twist in the tail. It gets predictable very quickly and by the half way point the main source of amusement is in (usually correctly) guessing the punchline.

Some respite is provided by a few more surreal moments, but the duo tend to let even their best ideas peter out instead of dropping in a much needed killer line. Many sketches are met with bafflement rather than laughter.

They also fail to establish any kind of comedic dynamic with one another. There’s little here to differentiate the two, other than their appearance, and there’s no real character development to tie the performance together.

These weaknesses all combine to create a disparate collection of sketches which is more sixth form revue than professional sketch comedy.