The American writer Whitney Balliett once described jazz as “the sound of surprise”, and if you add in sight and smell it’s not a bad description of what Fringe comedy is all about, too. Those of us clogging up the streets of Edinburgh this month all want to see the names we know, of course — and there are some very effective hours of comedy up here from Fringe favourites developing their craft.
But what you really want is to find that small, imperfect but inspiring show that couldn’t exist anywhere else. Something like seeing . . . ooh . . . two unknown American comics mounting, of all the hackneyed notions, a spoof of a happy-clappy Christian folk duo. And finding that it is a little piece of Fringe magic: an inventive, brilliantly sustained, brilliantly sung hour of character comedy that’s not quite like anything else you’ve seen before.
The duo in question are God’s Pottery, one of the word-of-mouth hits of this year’s comedy shows. The clean-cut, affable Gideon Lamb and Jeremiah Smallchild hope to bring us educational entertainment with religiously minded numbers such as The Pants Come Off When the Ring Goes On, a wag of the finger against pre-marital sex, and the anti-booze number Jesus I Need a Drink.
Gideon and Jeremiah’s creators are, respectively, Krister Johnson and Wilson Hall, a pair of 33-year-olds who live in New York. Overnight success has taken them 14 years. They first met at college in Philadelphia in 1992. Between then and now, they did improv and tried other characters, and for their own amusement they used to invent imaginary bands together. There was the eco-active Conservation Conversation. There was the randy hip-hop act Threeway, whose imaginary achievements included the song Ding-Dong Let’s F*** A Clock. And there was this show’s most obvious precursor, Community Unity, a socially inclusive folk group.
But God’s Pottery came about after both, separately, watched a Christian infomercial on American TV one night. “It’s inherently comical stuff,” says the dark-haired Hall. “You’ve got people saying things like, ‘Yeah, my nose is pierced for Jesus!’ You don’t need to tweak it too much.”
Advertisement
They introduced their characters at a comedy night in New York four years ago. But it took their British producer, Olivia Wingate, who saw them in New York last year, to suggest that they find a director and flesh out a song-based act into an hour-long show. The end result is beautifully observed, filled with cherishable couplets and toe-tapping tunes. What takes it beyond the realm of the one-joke wonder, though, is its lack of cynicism. “Although the duo are ridiculous, they are winning and sincere,” says Johnson. “We don’t want to mock anyone’s beliefs. We like the sense that in a different context they could pass for the real thing.”
Their short-term aim is to quit the day jobs — Johnson works at a law firm, Hall designs PowerPoint presentations for a financial firm — but nothing is for sure after becoming a Fringe talking point, of course. This city is littered with comics whose first show got them noticed, and who are now back with conspicuously less inspired follow-ups. But there’s something about this pair’s devotion to duty, their devotion to the characters, that makes you think that this should be more than a one-off.
“There are people who like God’s Pottery who have an agenda about the whole Christian issue,” says Johnson. “There was this guy in New York early on, he had made money on the internet boom and he wanted to set up a tour for us. He wanted to book us into churches in Middle America, then film us putting one over on them.” “And that,” adds Hall, “is really not what we’re about. We’re not out to mock the mom and pop churches of America.” A spoof of happy, smiling Christians that never descends into a sneer? It’s the kind of nice surprise that makes the Fringe worth the bother.