Review by Steve Bennett

An antidote to all those Oxbridge troupes doing clever, genre-twisting things with the sketch show format, Gein’s Family Giftshop are three dickheads who do jokes about ‘jizz and bumholes’ – as they admit for the second year running.

That’s not entirely true. They cover just about every other bodily function too, plus suicide and serial killers. The underlying tone is relentlessly dark, although their juvenile approach means the atmosphere is usually as silly as it is sick. Essentially they are an arrested-development trio who’ve not grown out of enjoying the sadistic taunt of: ’Stop hitting yourself’.

They play up, too, their image of being cheap and a bit shoddy; their simple black-and-white PE kits have become their uniform, their lack of props made an asset. Their fourth-wall transgressions amount to comments on their own shonky performance. ’I’m not supposed to be out of breath for this bit,’ Edward Easton gasps early doors, after an energetic skit bleeds into a more static one.

He’s usually the lowest status of the trio, the hapless sap to James Meehan’s putative authority figure. Kath Hughes is less the ‘ironic’ victim of the lads’ abuse than she was 12 months ago, more a stroppy harridan, snarling at the audience and her colleagues, showing where the real power lies. All play their scenes in a relaxed, naturalistic way, punchlines delivered as offhand comments, that further sets them aside from more theatrical sketch outfits.

There’s no huge change of direction from last year’s show, which earned them the Chortle best newcomer title and a Foster’s newcomer nod, although they are a little more confident in their outrageousness, a little less nasty at some of the harsher edges.

The strike rate for the writing has probably snuck up, too, from the quickies to longer pieces, such as the man preparing to leap to his death from a ledge. The only real enemy is fatigue for sketches unerringly built on atrocity and scatology – but that now is surely their trademark.

Review date: 9 Aug 2015
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard