The Breakfast Club

Bringing Fringe World out of the adult darkness and into the bright morning scrutiny of young audiences, The Breakfast Club is a cheerful slice of fringe mayhem.

Top tip for The Breakfast Club: Arrive a little early and enjoy the breakfast pastry and cuppa provided at the back of the tent. Seating allows room for tables in some rows, tables covered with paper and scattered with crayons allowing those with short attention spans to engage themselves in their own amusements. Some parents rearrange sections of seating to allow easier supervision of groups of playing children. And then we are ready for Fringe World’s top children’s weekend variety show.

Presenter Mickey D bravely works the audience, warming us up to welcome a variety of guests from various current Fringe World shows. With runs for individual shows being quite short, this guarantees a changing line up of talent through the festival, each testing their age appropriate material against the hardest crowd of all – children.  Mickey D himself charms the family crowd with daggy humour, fart jokes, cricket jokes, demonstrations of foreign languages and some unscripted interaction with his toddler daughter – it is slow, but edgy, never knowing where things are going next.  Suddenly we are introduced to the first guest, Jon Bennett.

Jon Bennett starts strongly with an inadvertent double entendre, that has parents guffawing as he quickly moves into tales of his childhood. Bennett engages well with the older children, but has all ages up on their feet with his physical comedy involving a couple of dads. Mickey D returns to pull faces, tell knock-knock jokes and make funny noises, before ushering Smart Casual to the stage for some novelty songs about playing card games and inflating balloons. In the third act, Harley Breen closes strongly with extended fart and swearing jokes, and stories about his son.

Organised for children’s attention spans, The Breakfast Club is a chance for parents to catch a sampling of current Fringe acts in a family outing. The show format is a good introduction to the world of stand up comedy for young audiences, and is a brilliant daytime use of the De Parel Spiegeltent. The late morning sun can turn the venue into a sweatbox, so parents are well advised to bring fans and plenty of water. But tickets are reasonably priced and aim to allow families to attend multiple times through the Fringe World season.