With his show and persona Mr Chonkers, American clown John Norris scored a cult hit on the fringe three summers ago – and now a booking off comedy’s beaten track, at anything-goes alt-theatre hub Summerhall. He’ll fit in, because his is a show (seemingly the same one he performed in 2022) that marches to the beat of its own drum. The upside of that? You never know what’s going to happen next. The downside: with little by way of theme, narrative or structure, there’s not much left to hang on to when the laughs abate.
A portion of the audience will be giggling too giddily for that to be an issue: Norris is the kind of act who, if he gets under your skin, doesn’t get out again. After a dotty prologue as a faceless monk, he offers us a supposed showcase of his recently acquired performance talents – in poetry, comedy and theatre. With a Janus-faced manner that twins eagerness to please with disciplinarian tendencies, he then serves up a tenuous film star impersonation (that wraps up the comedy section), some verse (including a standout about “horny wives in your area”) and – the bulk of the show, this – a theatrical act-out of a Sicilian family drama.
