Review: Late Night Gimp Fight, Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33)

Although one gimp short, and never really at the peak of its filth-encrusted powers, Late Night Gimp Fight remains a redoubtable force in sketch comedy.

* * *

After a couple of Fringe shows, you might imagine you’re blasé about paedophilia gags. But they manage to find original routines and songs to explore this darkest of subjects, rescuing it from the hack attentions of copycats. More than one lawyered-up celebrity might have reason to shift uncomfortably in their seat during a swinging courtroom number about passing off internet indiscretions as research.

That’s not to say every sketch is a winner, with their usually impressive hit-rate slightly down this year. An early skit, in which work colleagues rattle out chat about the weekend on typewriters, the increasing ferocity of the key-punching signalling a ratcheting up of aggression, never really takes off. And yet, in the archaic technology and steady build of the situation, you get a sense of the imagination and ambition they apply to everything. As ever, their production values are incredible for an act without broadcast exposure, exemplified by an animation-backed routine in which Jock Gimp (Matt Ralph) steals and abuses the shadow of Head Gimp (Lee Griffiths). Moreover, as Griffiths reveals quite graphically on a number of occasions, there are few limits to the lengths they’ll go to in order to get a laugh. It’s hard to think of another sketch troupe that keeps you so perched on the edge of your seat, wondering just what’s coming next.

Perhaps the expectation has become burdensome though, because the spectacle of their finale feels like a big closer for the sake of it, a fist-punching, rabble-rousing musical salvo that lacks the verve and imagination of much of what went before. Whether revolving around Scooby Doo, pantomime convention or the final moments of a suicide jumper, the Gimps’ set-ups tend to be better written and denser with laughs than many of their peers’ punchlines. When they do abruptly shift focus in a scene, the crowd’s gasps of hilarity break from a pre-existing swell of chuckles.

Until 27 August. Today 10pm.