Review: Comedy Soc: ‘One Million Years B.C’

A new year dawned upon Comedy Soc as we were taken ‘One Million Years Before Comedy’ for their latest sketch show.

As openly admitted by compare Danny McNamae, the theme didn’t have any relevance at all and left the audience questioning the point of it. That being said, the evening, consisting of 29 different sketches certainly tickled the audience throughout.

I have to admit, I have always had a soft spot for Comedy Soc having watched them grow and develop through the years, however I was quite let down with the overall standard of material at their latest instalment. The general tone of the pieces was at a much lower standard than previous shows.

I was quite surprised that the expertise that they gained from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this year was not brought into the performance. Admittedly, this was an evening to showcase the new members and their talent, however the more experienced members should have shared their knowledge and helped to nurture the new material more.

This was clearly seen in both of the Improv parts of the show, more practice was definitely needed. Credit is due for reacting rather well to the annoying audience member who was quite persistent in pushing his fetish for penguins into the scenes.

Two sketches that were quite humorous but would have benefited from more work were ‘Unexpected Item’ by Tom Hunt and ‘Ebola’ by Omkar Lekshmanan and Sean Gilbody.

A joke, which was used quite well throughout the performance, utilised Jeremy Paxman’s book ‘Empire’. A joke at SUSU’s expense – the book has been given out free to students over the last few weeks. Aidan Pittman performed it well every time and the joke was positioned cleverly to ensure plenty of laughs.

Jeremy Hunt’s original song again brought a nice change to the evening – I believe that he has the potential to compete in his own right if he focused on his comic song writing.

A writer who clearly shone above the others has to be Robbie Smith. His writing was extremely clever and concise. His sketches often got some of the biggest laughs of the night.

But even though there were some great sketches, unfortunately these weren’t enough to bring up the standard of the whole night.

Comedy Soc shouldn’t be too disheartened as the talent and potential is there. I would suggest that they run a few workshops with acting societies to allow their members to feel more comfortable on stage and when that comes, even if the writing isn’t great, the performances will be.