Written by: Michael Park
Published: Friday 17th August 2012

We sent Michael Park to sit down with three sixths of the purveyors of sketch tragedy Casual Violence to talk about their Fringe experiences and what it's like to finally be the school bullies...

First off, what's 'A Kick In The Teeth' about?

Adam: If you took five characters convinced the audience to love them and then have the exact opposite of what the audience would want to happen to them happen to them. That's basically what it is. It's kind Roald Dahlish in its conception.

James: It's the schadenfreude of sketch comedy. It's bleaker than sketch comedy has the right to be, it's basically taking five characters' lives and ruining them for the audience's amusement. For an hour.

Luke: With live music.

You are called Casual Violence; is that what audiences should expect from you or is that more of a hobby?

James: When we started out we did a different kind of dark comedy to the stuff we do now. The stuff we do now is a lot more tragic and bleak.

Luke: We've gone a different way to how we first started out. We started out doing more 'traditional dark comedy' and then found a niche in the kind of darkness which isn't usually quite as funny but which we exploit for our amusement. People either find an affinity with it and buy into it or just won't know how to take it.

Adam: If we were school bullies, we wouldn't be the kind to smash people's heads against lockers, we'd be the kind to exclude people and watch as, over the course of three years, they deteriorated to the point where they started a chess club. On their own.

James: Chess club for one. I think that's accurate.

How much of your personality goes into your characters?

James: I don't think they are us. People don't make the connection between me as a human being and what ends up in the show. They don't really understand why I'm writing these things. Neither do I. No-one's based on people I know but there are little bits of people that go in subconsciously.

Adam: His psychotherapist feels differently.

Luke: There's a lot in the characters that people can relate to though. The characters are really bizarre but there's always something that you feel empathetic towards.

Adam: I write the songs and when it comes to them, I don't think I've written a song in the last three years that isn't about unrequited love.

Luke: What about I Want A Sausage Dog?

Adam: Well, do I have a sausage dog?

Luke: No.

Adam: Exactly.

James: Someone asked me once whether my world view came out in the material and I said no, I don't think it does but the honest answer is that it's probably in there and I just can't admit it. If the show represents my world view then I have an incredibly bleak world view.

Luke: We're clearly not that fun to be around in real life.

Adam: We were the ones who got bullied.

James: We all set up chess clubs on our own. Casual Violence: six one-man chess clubs coming together.

Do you find the Fringe more enjoyable for being a group of individual 'chess enthusiasts'?

Adam: We're not restricted; we know other people up here and we know other people from Sussex Uni who are up and doing pretty well for themselves so if we get sick of the sight of one-another, we're able to go and hang out with other people.

James: This is our third year coming up as a group and I don't feel like any of us feel like we'd be better off without the others. We all feel that we work best as a group and bring the best out of each other.

Do you think that doing your own PR is better for selling your show than having people coquettishly place a flyer on a table and walk away?

Adam: Well, yeah. You've said it in the words we would have used.

Luke: It's definitely a double-edged sword. It's great to be able to go out and speak to people about your show but the drawback I can see is that all the bigger acts have people out doing the work for them and therefore if you're out flyering yourself then people assume that you're not worth seeing.

Adam: I've had people say to me that they're coming because we had flyered them ourselves.

Luke: If everyone took that attitude at the Fringe then it'd be a much nicer place.

James: It can feel pretty thankless sometimes if you're working for hours and hours and hours to bring people in and it's not translating into sales then it can feel a little bit demoralising.

Adam: Yeah, if you believe in material enough to write a full show and spend a year making it good before spending an unholy amount of money to bring it up here then there's no point in not going to speak to people about your show.

Do you reckon it's tougher for sketch acts to sell out than it is for a stand-up show?

James: It's hard to tell. There's two sides in that stand-up is the massive thing at the moment whereas sketch shows are out of fashion. These people who aren't really Fringe acts any more, the people who have been on telly and their flyers all read "As seen on Mock The Week" or "Star of Michael McIntyre's Comedy Roadshow" do have the people who go to shows purely because they've seen people on telly doesn't do much for us.

Luke: Sketch is a genre that has such potential for doing interesting things which isn't necessarily achieved. It's a lot easier to make it onto the telly as a stand-up than it is for a sketch group. Sketch acts don't have that exposure to the publicity that telly and radio appearances give you.

Adam: It's about people rather than characters too. Social media means that you're selling yourself on personality and trying to get people that way. Why develop a character over ten minutes when you can have 140 characters about what you had for breakfast?

James: What?

Adam: I didn't really think about that before I said it. It's the money thing as well. You can make a passable living from it whereas as a sketch group, you're splitting all the money you make and you don't have the opportunity to do comedy all the time.

James: You're right actually.

Adam: Can you make that the pull quote for this section? I want that for posterity. James saying, "You're right actually." I'll have it as evidence.

Luke: Stand-up will always drag an audience with personality as opposed to sketch groups who are coming up with characters.

Do you think that sketch shows are going to benefit from things like Live At The Electric and radio showcases?

Adam: I don't think it's wise to think of it in terms of benefits and not benefits because it depends on the acts and their teams. It might change things a bit but there's not been a big sketch show on TV for a very long time.

Luke: I don't think we'd suit Live At The Electric.

James: More generally I suppose you could say that if sketch shows are getting more publicity then it can only be good for us. Hopefully if things like that are a success then it means that people might be open to the idea of doing stuff with sketch comedy.

Luke: It's good that stuff like that is getting commissioned. Things like the BBC online pilots are getting things out to people.

Adam: Channel 4 Comedy Blaps is the best stuff that's coming through so far. It's not full shows that people don't have the patience to sit through but there's great sketches and acts that are on the same sort of stage as us who are coming out with really strong stuff. All the equipment's getting cheaper and distribution is so much easier with YouTube which is only going to help.

Finally, what would you say is the best thing about coming to see sketch comedy at the Fringe?

Adam: Umm... us.

That's it! That's what I was after, we can leave it at that.

James: That'll do then.

Luke: Wow, really?

Adam: [Laughs hysterically]

'Casual Violence: A Kick In The Teeth' is on at Just the Tonic at 10pm. Listing