Billed as ‘a Sketchy Goose’ Edinburgh Festival Fringe show, the most pertinent word is sketchy. There are lots of good and original ideas here, but it needs a lot of finessing if the jokes are going to land.
A pious start to the show with a priest welcoming a new pope, a wrestling strong man, soon up-skittled by the devil with a Texan twang. This is swiftly followed by a group of addicts getting their fix of party blowers – a nice idea – but if you need to squeeze a rubber goose to signal the end of the sketch you have to question whether there has been a punchline.
There is a song about rubbing a duck, presented dead pan, and it has the potential to be very funny – but for stoney faces to deliver, the wit has to be razor sharp – a few tweaks could make all the difference.
Seeking advice to get over a bereavement elicited a comically unlikely response from a therapist which got some good laughs, so too a surreal sequence taking English idioms literally. Imagining the inflatable people which wave outside car washes was a great moment of physical theatre and there was a fun sequence with a funereal macarena dance.
There is a lot of gun waving and far too many suicide references to make a lot of the jokes result in big laughs which is a shame because much of the material is good – the Teletubby sketch is good fun and there’s a lot of clever writing in a pasta scene.
An injection of energy and animation, some tightening of the writing and this could go down well in Edinburgh but right now, it’s not quite hitting the mark.
Reviewed on 11th July 2026, before it plays the Edinburgh Festival Fringe
The Reviews Hub Star Rating
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5
