Rich Fulcher: Tiny Acts of Rebellion

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The latest dispatch from Rich Fulcher’s ongoing efforts to stick it to the Man with minimum actual effort, Tiny Acts of Rebellion is every bit as boisterously shambolic and chaotically knockabout as we’ve come to expect from the Mighty Boosh and Snuff Box star.

Assisted by the intermittently chirpy and petulant Arnab Chanda, a recurring target for his maltreatment who deals back in kind, Fulcher’s appeal obviously isn’t his pseudo-lessons in insurgence but the way the bluff American sells his bullshit. With that chubby, expressive face flickering revealingly between supreme self-confidence and terrified desperation, Fulcher is a charismatic focus for a script that’s uneven but packed with choice lines throughout.

Such are the mischievous, myriad possibilities he evokes that he has no difficulty taking the audience with him through his more outlandish, off-kilter suggestions–or even in implicating them in lots of daft interaction, a crudely insulting, crowdsourced complaint letter a case in point. There are plenty of peaks and troughs over the course of the hour, so even when Fulcher finds his richest seam of laughs—as in a sequence where he journeys though an imaginary town abusing and being abused by Chanda’s shopkeepers—you intuit that it might grind to an incomprehensible halt at any second.

Equally though, the least promising setup will suddenly deliver out-of-the-blue hilarity, with nothing so much as a po-faced admonishment to his disbelieving sidekick that rape is indeed a crime. Stupid, undemanding fun.