Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

It’s always nice to see Simple Town in the UK. The NYC-based sketch quartet made their name with videos that felt like nothing else on the market with handmade production and strange, deadpan scenarios that evolve like the writers’ brains are glitching in real time.

Transferred to the stage, they’re a little more traditional. Their concepts are decidedly original, but with a few exceptions their staging doesn’t attempt to replicate the feverish quality of their videos. 

The opening sketch, in which Nasa scientists working on the moon landing are stunned to learn that their newest member – their first female colleague – can do multiplication tables in her head, could have slotted neatly into many other sketch shows, although the coolly detached way they perform is much more compelling than the standard sketch troupe yelling and gurning.

That laconic style of performance might also explain why they work much better with a younger crowd. In a sketch where a firing squad are won around by the extremely basic cod-philosophical conjectures of their prisoner, it becomes clear that this kind of droll absurdity doesn’t Cut the Mustard with the Pleasance’s older coach-tour crowd, many of whom are making eye contact with each other and shrugging, unable to understand why everyone below the age of 40 is in uproar.

Maybe it’s because I’m approaching that age myself, but I was less enamoured of the pieces which extended their beats into a long-form improv rhythm. 

A sketch in which one of the members describes an imaginary world at a contentious dinner party spins its wheels for quite a while without getting very far from its initial premise. But the one immediately preceding it about a pair of weird, golem-like boyfriends has a delightful interior logic, all the better for never explaining itself.

 Like most cultish experiences, you want it to be a little inscrutable.

Review date: 18 Aug 2025
Reviewed by: Tim Harding
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard