this is an article from 2015Oh FFS!
As you’ll know by now, this year Fringepig is presenting the Ham Fist Award for the review that gets the wrong end of the Fringe’s shittiest stick. We can’t WAIT to see who, this year, completely misunderstands what’s in front of them. But what about the reviewer bons mots that just make us roll our eyes and, sometimes, pray for death? Not just for ourselves, but for comedy, and for art, and sometimes for the whole of humanity? Here are ten of them from last year’s Fringe.
“No-one seriously expects him to have the means to solve the Middle East crisis. But I expected him to be better prepared to venture some answers on these thorny issues and rather more provocative and imaginative in his rejoinders.”
-Jay Richardson (Fest) is disappointed that a man fastened to a cross and pretending to be Jesus is short on parables.
“…with his stoner drawl, he can issue the dark material with a pistol silencer by destroying most religious ideologies with a whimsical wand that is somewhat free from aggression but atomically explosive with poignancy”.
-Chris Aitken (shortcom) chokes on a lethal cocktail of metaphors
“Mirza blithely pegs her audience as a crowd of typical Guardian readers … it’s an assessment that seems questionable to those of us who prefer the Morning Star.”
-Sean Bell (Fest) really wants us to know that he is a Communist. Again.
“If ‘herpes’ is rejected on the grounds of being ‘too far’ then I hate to imagine what would happen if you were to shout out the c-word.”
– Stuart Mckenzie (Broadway Baby) is upset at not being able to shout ‘cunt’ and ‘herpes’ during a child-friendly improvised alphabet game
“Carly Smallman got more than her share of brutal insults earlier this year, after appearing on the pisspoor ITV2 show Viral Tap.”
– Steve Bennett (Chortle) reserves judgment… for the first line of his review.
“Physically shaking sometimes holding it back, the tension between the cracking music hall grin and her underlying cynicism is tangible. Echoing the plight of a generation staring apprehensively towards 30 (a kind of living death) and back, at a decade of compromise between ideals and economy, she seems about to snap.”
– Joe Abel (Three Weeks) takes Rachel Parris’s comedy show a little too seriously
“A refusal to inject any menace into proceedings make the show feel that bit too rigid.”
– Chris Rumbles (Skinny) would like Angela Barnes to be more evil
“Sarah appears to be a sweet American girl, to hear her talking so graphically about such hardcore pictures was unexpected to say the least.”
– Graeme Connelly (Chortle) takes the Get-Back-In-The-Kitchen Award
“I won’t say too much about the comedians I saw that day partly because I didn’t catch their names.”
– Martin Powell (Theatre Extra) oozes professionalism
“The enraptured devotees howled with joy when their eponymous hero came onto the stage, dressed in a gorilla costume and a tweed jacket. He then proceeded to sit down on a rocking chair and began rocking. And that’s it…(1 star)”
– Andrea Valentino (Broadway Baby) fails to understand the massive concept behind A Young Man Dressed As a Gorilla Dressed As an Old Man Sits Rocking in a Rocking Chair for Fifty-Six Minutes and Then Leaves… 5