Comedy review: Cülture Elité, The Stand Comedy Club, Edinburgh

Norway is – as Lars Berrum and Marten Beyer-Olsen repeatedly tell us – the richest country in the world, so they do not need to be funny too.
Norwegian comics Lars Berrum and Marten Beyer-Olsen strike nerves and funny bones with absolute precisionNorwegian comics Lars Berrum and Marten Beyer-Olsen strike nerves and funny bones with absolute precision
Norwegian comics Lars Berrum and Marten Beyer-Olsen strike nerves and funny bones with absolute precision

Cülture Elité, The Stand Comedy Club, Edinburgh * * * *

But these guys are. And it is elite stuff. From Lars the extravagantly excited (and surprise award winning) warm-up spot, via fine wines and finer coffees and some visceral slam poetry to an explanation of art forms through the medium of mathematics, they bring funny from the fijords and we are all laughing.

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What raises this from just sketch laughs from oddly matched , deadpan, funnymen with accents is the steely centre to much of what they do. There is improv (which has a lot of shooting), Ibsen (which has a lot of shooting) and an extended rant from a Norwegian alt-right white supremacist which is only slightly less appalling than it is hilarious. This is probably the best few moments of comedy I have seen this August. And so near the knuckle they had to hand out elastoplast. Garry Serious is another of their brilliant creations and, if you are lucky, you will get to see him perform some of his genre destroying comedy with serious bits. Woke Lars is totally on point and the big message with which you leave the show is as chilling a thought as I have ever had implanted at a comedy show.

Stand 2 only holds fifty people, and you really should be one of them.

Until 25 August

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