I decided to go to Diphthong as soon as I was handed a flyer at the first Footlights Smoker of term. The cast were so good that I just had to see more. So I signed up to review the show and, after finding a second soul to fill that second complementary ticket, in I went for a night of entertainment.

The show opens with a quick introduction of the cast and moves on to established sketches by both duos. Mark and Haydn host “the radio show that gets too real” and perform the “unreal James Bond pantomime where human trafficking doesn’t end but at least they tried”, while Luisa and Ruby give their “fake striptease from Hell”, and “Chicken Factory Work Experience” sketches, among others. They all elicit laughter from the audience, as they should, and as they have in the past.

There’s a constant tension maintained between the absurdist comedy that Ruby and Luisa bring, and the largely situational humour that Haydn and Mark work with. There is also a point where they try adopting the other’s brand of humour (their aeroplane sketch comes to mind). Outrageous things happen when they pair up with someone from the opposite duo. A call is made on stage, someone loses something, and nothing is really found, mainly because they weren’t looking very seriously, and because nothing was really lost in the first place, except perhaps the serenity of the audience member in the third row of the audience.

Mark celebrates 5th November on stage shooting Luisa with a firearm. These sketches jarred the audience, before the realisation that it was a joke set in, and they started laughing. These sketches, however, are not nearly as funny, though still as entertaining, as what they usually do within their regular domains, or what they end up doing together as a unit of four.

When all four of them are on stage, their brilliance shines through. In fact, the funniest sketch of the evening was where a musical instrument presided over a wedding. And equally funny were the ‘speed dating’ bits that came in between the other sketches. The Fourth Wall was broken judiciously too, which is always nice. They played on meta-theatricality, recounting how the sketch came to be, and even going far into the future after the sketch had ended. Luisa kills someone and Ruby dies.

There is one caveat if you’re going to watch Diphthong: if you’ve seen the first Footlights Smoker from earlier in the term, you will find some sketches are exactly the same. They’re still brilliantly done, and just watching them for a second time doesn’t take anything away from them per se. In fact, some are still funny the second time round, which goes to show just how robustly comic they are. However, if you’ve been following these people for a while, you can’t help the fact that they will seem familiar, and that takes away from some of the humour. But there is certainly enough new material to make this worth your while.

All in all, Ruby, Luisa, Mark, and Haydn are all people to watch out for. Their writing is crisp and on point. Their absurdist jokes are sudden and pleasantly unexpected. I’m looking forward to more new material from these four