Dan Cook: Community Service

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On community service for throwing a quiche at a dog, Dan Cook—gone solo after several years with sketch troupe Delete The Banjax—has been tasked not with picking up litter but entertaining Edinburgh Fringe audiences with a selection of skits, songs, dance moves and dodgy one-liners. Remind me who’s serving time at Her Majesty’s pleasure here again, us or him?

Tall and gangly, with mannerisms cribbed from Alan Partridge, Cook’s a naturally funny sight in his orange jumpsuit stamped ‘Gotbusted Penitentiary’, and the biggest laughs of the show come as he flings himself about the stage between sequences to the sound of Chaka Demus and Pliers. The impromptu stuff too comes by instinct – for instance his quick-fire interaction with a guy in the front row whose name is so comedy-perfect I’m not entirely convinced he isn’t a plant. “Tristan Rogers?” Cook hoots. “He sounds like a sex novel!”

But then there’s the scripted material, which is consistently iffy. The bit where two female audience members are cajoled into acting out a fight between Venus and Serena Williams behind the falafel van at Dorset Steam Fair momentarily takes things to a properly weird and mischievous place, yet it’s a rarity next to the likes of a shoddy Ed Sheeran send-up and a true cringer about the folly of buying oversized maracas.

Lastly we get the true story of Cook’s dog-assault, by way of an intentionally convoluted flashback touching on many of the last hour’s jokes, which serves only as a tedious reminder of laughs that never were. Time served.