Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

He breaks everything he touches. Now the ever-unsettling Jordan Brookes is – unlikely as it seems – deconstructing musical theatre, having his distinctively ridiculous crack at the genre after watching a terrible song-and-dance show about the Titanic and reckoning he could do better. 

It won’t surprise you to learn that Fontanelle isn’t quite as simple as that. Even Brookes – who performs barefoot with a dinky captain’s cap on his head  –  warns us we won’t like how he’s done it,  primarily givingus the briefest of out-of-context snippets at random intervals.

Of course, he’s not interested in yet another straight retelling of the liner’s story, but he is interested in talking about how society processes mass tragedies like this and 9/11. Interestingly, Brooks has a joke about Titanic victims that’s essentially a more depressive version of an edgy gag Joan Rivers had about those in the Twin Towers.

Then there’s the ‘women and children first’ cry, which led to male Titanic survivors being ostracised on their return to Britain for being cowardly in not going down with the ship. When does chivalry become a damaging ‘stiff-upper-lip’ orthodoxy? 

Brookes’s complex examination of masculinity also includes talking at uncomfortable length about the joy of sticking things up your arse. High thoughts coupled with base instincts is pretty much Brooks’s brand.

On the flip side of the issue, the comedian is keen to give the microphone to women in the audience to amplify their voices, literally. Few take advantage, but it adds another element of edgy unpredictability to a show that keeps you guessing what course we’re on.

And all this before we reach the titular fontanelle, the very vulnerable soft spot on a newborn’s head where the skull has not yet fused properly. Brooks imagines this extending into adulthood, and uses his flexible physicality to mime just how we’d dice with death if we had such an easily accessible ‘power off’ button. You feel dirty just watching him act this out, though it’s hard to know why, given the absurdity of the premise.

It’s a typically potent and edgy presentation of Jordan’s over-analysis of off-the-wall ideas, funny and disorientating in equal measure. But, like the RMS Titanic, it goes down well.

Review date: 10 Aug 2024
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett