Jordan Brookes: Fontanelle ★★★★★ Pleasance Dome (Venue 23) until 25 August How can a comedy show displaying such dogged rectal fixation be so sophisticated? When it’s from the mind of Brechtian master of the form, Jordan Brookes, that’s when. As is typical with this past winner of the Edinburgh Comedy Award, you find yourself lurching between agonising laughter and shock, and then lying awake for hours thinking about what it all means. On the face of it, Fontanelle is about how we mine tragedy for content, playing with ideas about how much time needs to pass before we can feast on it for entertainment.
But it feels like it's more about nihilism and the spectrum of masculinity in a quickly changing world. Brookes, with customary bare feet and legs, ambles on with a tiny captain’s hat stuck to his head. It’s right where his fontanelle – the soft spot on a baby’s head that remains vulnerable until parts of the skull grow to connect – would have been.
Could you be trusted not to press on yours if you had one as an adult? He talks about having travelled to see a bad musical about the Titanic, and how he became obsessed with the story. He muses upon everything from whether everybody on board truly wanted to survive, to the idea that distress signals seen from afar by potential rescuers could be misinterpreted as entertainment. It’s not a difficult metaphor to grasp.
Acknowledging that this might be an act of self-sabotage, he introduces audacious musical t.