Son of a Bush!
The Bongo Club, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Group: Sage

Tom Ogg

There are three cultural traits that mark out America in the opinion of the poet Sage, an American himself. Americans are really fat and do things to excess; they shop for fun; and they love Jesus.

Sages delivery is in rhyming couplets, and sometimes the way he fits words to rhyme is pretty good; after all he is a poet. But it seems that the poet side of him is far stronger than the comic. He seems all to often to sacrifice laughs for rhyme, rendering passages utterly meaningless. That said, his script can be highly sophisticated, particularly when taking on the evangelicals of America.

Sage strangely combines Billy Connolly's ranting and raving with the high-pitched panic of the professor in the Back to the Future films pontificating on the fallout from the altered timeline. While Billy Connolly is funny, and copying the professor's style might be, imagine them rapping in rhyming couplets, and then swallowing the microphone when they gets particularly excited. If you'd like that, you'd like Sage.

Anti-Americanism seems to have become so easy and natural to so many of the British public. We have become well versed over the last two years in chastising America for its hypocrisy, war mongering, and commercialism. It can be pretty boring and simplistic sometimes. Son of a Bush goes against the grain in some ways, but its the same tired old wood.

While displaying his belly as part of persuading us that Americans were all fat (despite the trim Americans in the audience) he moaned about the 'super size' portions of fries on offer in McDonalds, and the fact that despite selling a medium size, there is no small, which logically there ought to be. True, but it would have been more convincing if Sage had acknowledged and accounted for Big Food's response to such criticism; most noticeably at McDonalds, where they now even sell 'healthy' food and snacks. There ought to be a few jokes there, poetic or otherwise.

Sage knows all about the recent US 9/11 report with censored sections on Saudi Arabia (the biggest Christian killer of all of them, apparently). When he challenged us to explain why the US had not invaded Saudi, the answer I was waiting for with bored anticipation was 'oil'. However, Sage thinks that the US won't invade Saudi because they need to protect the airbases there. Different, but no more convincing. There is plenty of room for airbases in Iraq (well, there is now), and Donald Rumsfeld has already announced that the US will withdraw its airbases from Saudi Arabia.

Sage tells us that he was born while his mother was on acid (Sage, not Rumsfeld). That seems about right. Son of a Bush comes from an American anti-American poet who has the capacity to be both jarring in the extreme and at times intellectually sharp; it's childish humour mixed with academic irony yet devoid of substance.

11 August to 20 August.

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