Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

A sort of knockabout, two-hander version of the Numskulls, for those familiar with the enduring children's comic strip, My Last Two Brain Cells aspires to be a workplace farce set in the brain of a man who's been in a traumatic incident and whose condition is worsening by the minute.

Cerebral it ain't. But creator-performers Joe Pike and Tom Hazelden are a likeable duo who first brought this energetic nonsense to the Fringe a year ago.

The audience are cast in the role of hormones, assigned name badges on arrival at the venue, though in truth it's only the major players like Adrenaline and Oestrogen that have any part in the narrative, along with the show's vocally aggressive, punningly monikered tech.

Inducting the hormones into the body, Brain Cell Number 64,928,480,327 (Pike), better known to his annoyance as Clive, is a strait-laced company man, conducting the flight safety video-like introduction with breezy efficiency and practised crap jokes.

But he's soon joined by the laddish, lairy Number 12 (Hazelden), a disruptive force and head of the immaturity department, who used to work with Clive when he was in the sense of humour department and the pair formed the brain's first double act, an Abba tribute band.

With Clive having felt the humour role beneath him, he's now leading the censoring office, and there's lingering resentment between them.

Now, I'm no student of neuroscience. But what happens next, as the brain goes into emergency mode, prompting all the millions of brain cells to flee and leaving only a panicking Clive and 12, seems like a plausible enough representation of bodily trauma experienced from inside a head. 

Naively ignorant of death as they frantically consult their instruction manuals, the pair then desperately try to instruct their anthropomorphised operating system, Cerebra. Yet a series of poor decisions by the impulsive, bungling 12 drastically reduces the time they have left until the brain switches off forever.

Recriminations boil to the surface. A Bottom-like slapstick fight ensues, before morphing into a Spaghetti Western style-stand-off with a third party. Suddenly, the duo unite to find the precise cause of their predicament, becoming police and wading into the audience to grill suspects about their man's assailant. 

Ultimately, with a last roll of the dice, they prompt the victim to review footage of his life to try to jog him back to consciousness, a wartime saga of loss and love imbued with a French flavour, with Pike and Hazelden naturally playing all the parts.

The lack of anything approaching hard science in My Last Two Brain Cells isn't necessarily a benefit, as the pair over-indulge in increasingly contrived, unrelated scenarios. Meanwhile, the audience interaction element never really pays off as much as it's set up to do.

Wrapped up with a bit of a cheat too, in that everyone, everywhere, loves the greatest hits of Sweden's best known pop group, My Last Two Brains Cells nevertheless qualifies its reconciliation saga and happy ending in an admirable manner, the bleakness of the situation of Gary, the host body, contrasted throughout with the manic, throwaway antics of Clive and 12 on the bridge of their fast-sinking ship.

Hazelden is puppyishly arresting as the unrepentant pleasure-seeker, grabbing life to live and seldom thinking of the consequences, while Pike, as the supposed straight man, winningly conveys a buttoned-up bureaucrat having a nervous breakdown just as the nervous system itself shuts down.

Don't think too hard about My Last Two Brain Cells and you'll find enough here to appreciably tickle your limbic system.

Review date: 25 Aug 2024
Reviewed by: Jay Richardson
Reviewed at: Underbelly Cowgate