Cardinal Burns review – an absurd night of cut-above comedy

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/sep/15/cardinal-burns-review-soho-theatre-london

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TV sketch shows on stage sometimes resemble catchphrase karaoke: comics parade their characters, the audience parrot their favourite lines. Cardinal Burns’s cultish Channel 4 series – dark, cinematic, puerile and smart in equal measure – offers plenty of fodder for a love-in, but Seb Cardinal and Dustin Demri-Burns usually resist the temptation. And they can afford to: their first UK touring show is hilarious in its own right. The action is infectiously ridiculous, the performances commanding but also full of delight, and often there are several equally funny jokes operating on different levels simultaneously.

Some of them are old – by which I mean, the sketches already featured in the pair’s breakout 2009 Edinburgh show. Time hasn’t been kind to them all: the sleaziness of Turkish cabbies Hashtag and Bukake, for example, is getting cruder. But some are bulletproof. A sketch treating potatoes as if they were exotic jewellery is deliciously absurd. The spoof interview show I Know Your Name, in which Cardinal’s Mark Cousins-alike presenter quizzes a nobody as if he were a glamorous celeb, contrives to send up both the fame game and the world of dead-end McJobs.

It’s also a joke about a preposterous voice: here and elsewhere, the duo reap rich rewards from their flair for accents abstracted into nonsense sounds. (Witness the Sloane ranger describing her date with Benedict Cumberbatch: “We just instantly claaahked.”) Earlier, there’s an enjoyable opener in which two family men recount falling in love at an insurance conference in Hove. That Cardinal and Demri-Burns resist the easy joke (ramping up the homoeroticism) in favour of an unusual one (the starriness of the pair’s mutual affection) raises hopes for a night of cut-above comedy, which are amply fulfilled.

• Until 20 September. Box office: 020-7478 0100. Venue: Soho theatre, London. Then touring.