EXPRESS COMEDY
The Mighty Boosh
At The Pleasance
JEREMY NOVICK
Picture this. The lights go down. Two men dressed in white sheets and shower caps creep on stage. Their faces are covered in white cream and they are literally smothered in cotton wool balls.
These strange coves tiptoe around for a few minutes then creep off. What does it mean? You work it out. But in a town where a woman standing at a bus stop waiting for the No. 7 will be acclaimed as surreal, this was the real thing.
The Mighty Boosh - Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding - pulled off that strange feat of being genuinely weird, but at the same time wonderfully funny.
Barratt is a rare beast: a natural. The way he looks, the way he moves, his mannerisms, are all unforced or, more importantly, seem to be. Fielding, the bemused, slightly naïve straight man, plays off him perfectly.
Mad notions and flying gags aligned with more conventional comic imaginary - “some joker dropped bamboo in the penguin enclosure, they all vaulted out” - combined to create a show that for once thoroughly justified the word-of-mouth.
- The Mighty Boosh, The Pleasance Above,