Paul Foot: Still Life

Edinburgh veteran Paul Foot’s latest effort is actually listed in the Fringe programme as "performance art". Barely five minutes into this irresistibly clever, willfully obtuse show it’s pretty clear why. The stage is dark and empty. Foot, behind a curtain at the side of the venue, is talking through what will happen when the show begins. Five minutes later, he’s still explicating.

With his thin frame, long mullet and flared trousers, Foot looks rather like a cross between the lead singer of the Darkness and Dennis Waterman circa The Sweeney. And if his sartorial style is off the wall it’s nothing compared to his comedy. Tonight Foot doesn’t so much tell jokes as deconstruct the entire artifice of comedy, scene by painstaking scene.

After 15 minutes "we’re about ready to start the show", with a series of what Foot calls "glimpses" – surreal premises, most memorably involving Iain Duncan Smith and a cockerel sanctuary, that aren’t so much jokes as hints at jokes. From there it’s a segue into Foot’s alter-ego, Penny, a lascivious bisexual woman who thinks nothing of aurally assaulting audience members, before Foot climaxes with 10 minutes of quite literally talking gibberish.

By turns verbose, bawdry and witty, Foot consistently challenges the audience, who, after a little early resistance, respond with steady, sustained laughter. It might be a performance, and at times it can feel a little too considered, but Still Life is undoubtedly the work of a quality comic near the top of his game.