Review by Steve Bennett

Will Franken is an astounding character comedian who makes almost everyone else in his field look like lazy chancers.

In fact, character comedian doesn’t even do this whip-smart San Franciscan justice; for he’s a one-man sketch machine, with scores of personas, all perfectly realised, tumbling from the stage in a relentlessly fast-paced and witty commentary on modern life.

He’s like a chameleon with attention deficit disorder:  morphing between therapists, celebrities, preachers, silver-tongued salesmen, Victorian prostitutes and self-appointed community leaders – every one of them distinctive and believable. Well, maybe not the prostitutes; they are most definitely daft caricatures, but nonetheless they still evoke the foggy streets of turn-of-the-century Whitechapel, albeit in cartoon form.

Lying somewhere near where The Onion meets South Park on the comedy landscape, Franken gleefully skewers the smug self-importance of liberal America, the grief porn of modern media or the posturing of the arrogant with a rapier satirical wit that cuts close to the bone.  Or sometimes he’s just plain silly; that works too.

Then he’s layered on joke upon joke on his taut script. He’s looked at every word, even down to the character names, and asked himself ‘Can I make this funnier’ and not rested  until the answer is an unequivocal ‘no’. A couple of times he indulges himself in a slightly longer sketch, but only one, the rock’n’roll violinist, has any slack; the rest are as much fun for us as they are for him.

The writing flows briskly and seamlessly between the brief vignettes; but for all its precision, the show feels loose and fresh – perhaps a bit too loose in the case of the opening gambit that baffled the audience member whose cooperation was required. But generally Franken’s personality as a natural, likeable performer is allowed to glimmer beneath the convincing characters he wears so well.

Close in style to the Pajama Men, but less surreal, Franken is not yet attracting the audience numbers he deserves in his late-night Caves slot. But he will – for word spreads quickly around Edinburgh about this sort of tour-de-force debut performance, even before the awards rumour-mill kicks in.

Review date: 6 Aug 2012
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Just The Tonic at The Caves