Caravanserai is back at Brighton Fringe after a few years absent, and in spite of the efforts of the lovely staff, there are some issues. In a tight, fenced-off site to the north of St Peter’s Church, liberally peppered by wacky objects and post-apocalyptic buses, people come here to party and to get wasted – it feels more like a festival site than a fringe venue. There’s an issue with the noise bleed from the DJs into the tent where the artists perform, giving the unfortunate impression that the shows are an afterthought to the important game of getting people to drink as much booze as possible.
At 10:30pm, Will & Noah, experienced Fringe performers and winners of the inaugural London SketchFest earlier this year, handle the noise better than most, but they shouldn’t have to. Theirs is a high-paced, gloriously chaotic, and occasionally dark show about winning, awards, and the many, many ways that one can compete, and fail. In one pointed aside, Noah gets a laugh by pointing out that at his age, a lot of his friends have houses, while he does sketch comedy. Access to the arts, and who gets to do this these days, is a recurrent theme at this year’s Fringe, with many of the more hyped-up acts benefiting from private education, contacts in the industry, and parents with very deep pockets.
Winner Winner Chicken Dinner, meanwhile, is the work of a genuine one-off, except there are two of them. Combining musical comedy, sketch, daft audience participation, and some very funny animated jokes to help with the transitions, this is loose, daft, occasionally pun-heavy stuff.
Highlights include a brilliant extended skit at a youth football team’s end-of-season awards, as hosted by two extremely desperate dads; a chef and a food photographer embarking on a silly but oddly profound exploration of creative worth, and an appalling, Little ‘n’ Large style 1980s comedy double act rolling out those non-PC jokes for one last time before they perhaps get “cancelled” forever.
The two, dressed in bow ties and velvet in the style of old-time mainstream entertainers, are subversive presences, whose funny little asides are sometimes lost in the noise of the tent, and might need to slow down, slightly, if they are to reach the mass audience that the quality of their performances and joke-writing skills deserve.
There also might be even more they can do with the “winners and losers” theme, an even stronger arc that pulls all these disparate, high quality sketches and songs into something a bit more emotionally compelling.
But as they point out, we’re all winners at something, and your correspondent hereby awards Will & Noah the coveted prize of funniest sketch show at Brighton Fringe during the second weekend of May 2026.
Reviewed on 8th May.
