Mr Snot Bottom's Stinky Silly Show

• Anna Burnside
• 10 August 2012

This article is from 2012

Fifty minutes of fart, bum, booger

The scatological stage is one that all pre-schoolers go through, and Mr Snot Bottom’s hour of fart-bum-eugh gags is cunningly calculated to get as many hot-button words into 50 minutes as is humanly possible.

He is a fit Australian chap with a whiff of Wiggo in the facial hair and a parallel vocabulary of fart noises. Assisting him is Phlegm, who has a very cool haircut for a gob of mucous, and Derek the human hankie, who rips off his bogey-covered kaftan to reveal a pink tutu.

The show lacks what discerning parents might recognise as a viable narrative arc. It sags in places and leaps from sub Mr Bean slapstick to visual gags (including a great one with a toy phone). It gets more conceptual when Phlegm is desperate to sing a nursery rhyme, but Mr Snot Bottom intervenes on health and safety grounds. Incey Wincey Spider prompts a full-scale arachnophobia attack. Why, he asks, did Humpty Dumpty not just sit on a chair? He’s an egg? No wonder he falls off the wall.

Then it’s straight back to the Fart Gallery.

Gilded Balloon Teviot, 622 6552, until 26 Aug (not 13 & 20–22), 11am, £9–£10 (£8–£9).