Late Night Gimp Fight

Opening a show by projecting your worst reviews onto a large screen might seem a brave business. In reality, it's a risk-free but rather clever way of hauling an audience onside from the start – a shortcut to blitz the dull arbiters of taste who would insist that the smut the audience are giggling uncontrollably at isn't, in fact, funny. It's not the only smart choice this foursome make: in an hour which is all about fun rather than close-to-the-bone comedy, this collection of sketches doesn't really demonstrate the claimed commitment to the "depraved" so much as to bawdy toilet humour. It's all the excitement of feeling part of a subversive comedy movement, without actually needing to leave feeling "dirty and used" – a fact of which I am extremely thankful. One does, however, leave feeling pretty drained on account of laughing for the large part of an hour – again, a positive in my book.

What Late Night Gimp Fight serves up here is a pacy, slick and largely original whirlwind of sketches. Crediting their audience with some degree of intelligence (another smart move), the group are freed from the need to spell out setups or punchlines. The result is a set which errs on the side of grabbing the laughs and sprinting on, rather than on the side of indulgence. Indeed, those few longer sketches—presumably added to vary the pace—feel laboured by comparison, say, to a 10 second visual joke about the Kamikaze Pilots Reunion 2012. Much more exciting variation is provided by mixing punchlines so obvious you can see them lumbering in for miles with ones that creep up and crack you in the side of the head. Smart choices; big laughs.