Comedy smash-hits come in all shapes and sizes. You’ve got your standup, your sketch – and then there are those shows in which semi-naked Australians impersonate penguins to dramatise the western literary canon. Such is Garry Starr: Classic Penguins by 43-year-old goofball Damien Warren-Smith, which delighted Edinburgh last summer, then hoovered up awards on the Australian festival circuit. After winning the prestigious Best Show gong at Melbourne’s Comedy festival (“for me that’s a Commonwealth gold,” says Warren-Smith, “and Edinburgh’s the Olympics”), this unlike-anything-else comedy set is now returning to the UK, picked up by fringe super-producer Francesca (Fleabag) Moody and expanded for bigger audiences.
The show, which animates a bookshelf full of Penguin classics in 60 minutes, is not a complete departure for its host. Yet another graduate of celebrated French clown school Ecole Philippe Gaulier, Warren-Smith’s first stunt was to showcase every theatre style in under an hour (Garry Starr Performs Everything, 2018), and his second was to bring all of Greek mythology to life in the same timeframe. It’s a simple formula, as he admits: “Choose a highbrow topic that most people know quite a lot about, then just get it wrong – which makes me stupider than everybody else.” Garry, according to his creator, isn’t a character, he’s just “the most enthusiastic but slightly less intelligent version of myself. He’s like me if I had no inhibitions.”
