Brighton Fringe comedy review by Steve Bennett

Brother-sister comedy double acts are thin on the ground, giving Jack and Anna Harris – aka Horace – a unique selling point they are keen to exploit.

Much of Default Friends is built on the premise that they are seeking a third sibling for a variety of preposterous reasons, so have come to this community meeting to invite applications after their original idea, a Gumtree ad, backfired.

On to this framework they hitch a number of sketches from a silly video parody of the Who Do You  Think You Are? opening credits to a quiz about the crazy things their mum has said – a segment so entertaining that when a promised follow-up about dad’s oddities fails to materialise, it causes a murmur of genuine disappointment.

They can boast plenty of enjoyably offbeat jokes, but their main strength is their personas. It’s pretty much the classic combo of Anna as the dimwitted one content in her simple-minded world, with Jack the more authoritative on,e but still not immune from unselfaware stupidity.

Given their lifelong relationship, it’s no surprise that they have an easy chemistry, so while the show is almost adorably under-rehearsed, it allows some real personality show through.

As well as the sibling hunt, Anna also plays Sainsbury’s Julie, sharing with us the ‘hilarious’ in-jokes she makes over the store Tannoy, while Jack offers a guide to teaching that could only have come from hard-won first-hand experience.

That said, this section goes on way too long, a criticism that can be levelled at quite a bit of their work. There seemed to many classroom formations, just as the earlier section about the fictional Isle of Harris, where their clan supposedly originated, outstayed its welcome.

But the good-natured quirkiness and off-the-wall ideas are enough to overcome sometimes overindulgent writing, especially if you take the Brighton Fringe performance of Default Friends as a work-in-progress (though it’s not advertised as such). Kinks of pacing can be ironed out and sluggish segments can be edited –  but their funny bones are genetic.

Review date: 8 May 2017
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