Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Comedy is all about interpretation, like music it can transcend across boundaries, international borders and the pain of the language barrier; comedy is the reason to laugh at the world when the world has destroyed almost everything else you have lived for. Whilst some words or actions can become lost, drift in another fruitless direction, translation is the key and it is one that the Shaved Dog Comedy duo of Danny Bradley and Michael Burton decode with genuine honest appeal and superb flair.

Yolav & Graham’s Jovial Trauma, Refugee Stand Up at 81 Renshaw Street is the result of many factors and events that the world instability and Government insanity has brought together, the refugee crisis, the unbelievable acts of humanity’s need to exert control and destroy a country and its people, it is the ability to take one person out of millions desperately trying to save themselves from persecution and make them larger than life; a state of mind that comedians arguably fall naturally into anyway.

For an hour Yolav, a refugee who can offer dramatic straight parts, observational humour, the odd impression, very odd and very impressionable, and straight comedy gets down to the bare facts about life as a refugee, as a comedian on the run. It is interpreted by the meek and mild Graham, a man to whom everything falls upon, a man who has to make sense of everything the comedian has too say, a job that would be difficult enough when translating some other comedian’s work and the result is gold, a diamond that works because of the insanity of the world.

Danny Bradley and Michael Burton show the point of translation by taking it down the surreal road, the path of the bizarre, the head turned at a weirdly placed angle, and present a piece, not so much of straight out comedy but natural theatre. This is the package in which the layers of tragedy and elation mix freely and it is a credit to the memory skills of Danny Bradley and the quick fire use of creative talking of Michael Burton that the show comes alive so quickly and so earnestly.

Interpretation, not everyone can see it, let alone act upon it but Shaved Dog Comedy it is a natural and progressive movement.

For other events on during the Funny Looking Fringe during the Liverpool Comedy Festival go to www.funnylooking.co.uk.

Ian D. Hall