Harry Shearer
Assembly Rooms

Now here’s a bit of a Fringe miracle: a pair of unknown Americans who take aim at the easiest of targets and yet score a very palpable hit. God’s Pottery are Gideon Lamb and Jeremiah Smallchild, a beamingly affable New York folk duo who bring audiences the word of our Lord Jesus Christ through the power of song and sketches.

They sing against premarital sex in The Pants Come Off When the Ring Goes On. They serenade Muslims and Jews with the song A New Start with Christ. And, in their Life Skillz mini-dramas, they tackle issues such as drink and drugs. We have a motto, smiles the bowl-fringed, guitar-playing Gideon. Too much of anything is too much.

But what’s really heavenly about the show is the unwinking commitment the actors, Krister Johnson and Wilson Hall, make to their characters. Gideon and Jeremiah are blinkered boobies, perhaps, deeply judgemental behind their perma-grins and platitudes. But they mean well and sing divinely on toe-tapping tunes that are never more than an inch away from complete credibility. So they sustain the gag over an hour devoted to raising funds for the cancer-ridden black kid they met on a trip to Harlem.

Some of their mini-dramas come closest to the unwieldy irony in which, in other hands, the whole show might drown. But mostly the combination of dark comedy and joyful sincerity works wonders. What’s more, the joke is on the duo’s delivery rather than their deity — there’s nothing here that Christians shouldn’t enjoy.

While God’s Pottery are a holy unexpected surprise, Harry Shearer and Judith Owen’s show This is So Not About the Simpsons (American Voyeurs) is a real disappointment. Shearer, voice of Mr Burns and others in The Simpsons, is a super-bright commentator on American insularity. But he and his singer-songwriter wife too often tell us what we already know.

That’s a real shame, because Shearer can cut to the quick — at his best here he scythes through America’s inability to doubt its own selfishness. But a sophisticated framework then catalogues flaws that comedy has been addressing for decades — body fascism, the cult of fame, jingoism. The show is organised around Welsh-born Owen’s songs, which repeat the points the couple’s intros have already made. The end result feels like a Judith Owen cabaret show with pithy observations by Harry Shearer bolted on.

God’s Pottery (0131-556 6550).

Harry Shearer and Judith Owen (0131-226 2428).

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