Stephen Daytime reviews Isaac Kessler’s 1-Man No-Show, winner of Best Clown Show at Montréal Fringe 2026 — an anti-serious fever-dream that permits no boredom. A striptease where the bazongas are jokes, a country auctioneer badgering the audience through wanky meta-layers, and a performer you’d pay to read you a telephone book. 4.5 stars, with pasties still hiding something.
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Inanity, annoyance and charm: what’s behind the pasties, Mr. Kessler?
Upcoming: July 15–26 at Winnipeg Fringe.
Winner: Best Clown Show at Montréal Fringe 2026; also best of fest Orlando Fringe, Artists’ pick Edmonton Fringe, Artists’ Encore Cincinnati fringe.
Sometimes when clowns talk to clowns, they talk about how close clown is to performance art. There’s truth to it. The parallel is sharpening in years of late as “existential” and absurd clown, (clown singular, as in the action/state, and not clowns, which focuses more on the clown as a figure), gains popularity. In meaningful ways, performance art is a closer cousin to modern clown than is theatre, stand-up, or circus, which are the usual reference points that non-clowns use to talk us up at parties. Sometimes, I explain smugly that the only difference is that one permits boredom and one does (or should) not. “Does your ass lift off the chair, ha ha ha” a former teacher, Philippe Gaulier (RIP) would say, “or is he/she fucking boring?”
Here, in the case of Isaac Kessler’s 1-Man No-Show, is a show that permits no boredom. The performance art parallels are there, but are seriously demented by Kessler’s fundamentally unserious… or, anti-serious fever-dream of a show. As the title suggests (I can’t figure out if this is intentional or not) it’s almost so un-show that it’s not really a show.
It’s kinda like a striptease, except the bazongas (jokes) are concealed behind wanky meta-layers by a performer who harangues the audience like a country auctioneer, badgering them to guess at the jokes and find the games. Further, the stripper embroils himself and audience members in a confusion of Kramer-y arguments about just what’s happening, until finally, oh, look, it’s just happened, and as the previous stripper exits quickly, you wonder for a faint moment if the joke is actually on you, until another new stripper arrives with yet another elaborate set of decoys to hide yet another set of bazongas.
The journey is the destination. It’s all absurdly pleasurable, and I urged everyone I saw at fringe to see it. A string of obtuse prankjokes and stale puns, and/but, a strange energetic man serving them up very fresh, and very strange. Kessler’s presence meets and commentates on absolutely everything that happens in the room, all filtered through a tiny, tinny on-body mic and amp (think: tour guide) that just barely amplifies him above the waves of surprised laughter that carry him through the show, as he deadpans his groaners and willfully avoids eating every banana that flies towards him.
There are performance principles at play: a good clown show happens when a performer hones their weird pH so well, (“You have to insist on your stupidity” says my mentor, Giovanni Fusetti) that it leads them and the audience into an hour of material. Kessler has this hypnotic spirit of “hey watch me do this cool thing” that a nine-year-old would use to make their parents forget and re-forget that it’s bedtime. That’s what you’re paying to see in 1-Man No-Show: here’s someone you’d pay to read you a telephone book, but who you absolutely wouldn’t pay to teach you anything meaningful. But then, is anything meaningful, anyways?
Maybe-maybe not; opinions vary. How thin can a premise be, you ask, until when you arrive at the end of the hour (counted down by a large and equally prankful on-stage digital clock) you find yourself motorboated by yet another pair of unvulnerable bazongas. I’ve seen this sort of anti-artistic clown work, and feel astonishingly refreshing. Kessler is walking a fine line, and the laughs do very occasionally run on the fumes of the audience’s surprise that he’s actually doing what he’s actually doing.
So maybe 1-Man No-Show is just a bit too we’re-gonna-blow-these-normies’-minds-cynical to have really blown my mind. I’m a clown too, so this might be my own cynical form of insider baseball, but it’s all a titch too coy and elusive for me to be fully absorbed in the way I know I can be.
I have a friend who saw Kessler perform a few years ago in LA and found his coyness really attractive and hilarious, in a field where performative vulnerability is so-hot-right-now. But she also said it could have been called “No Man No Show”.
If I insist (I often do) that performance art is tiring and didactic unless leavened by some humour, I am left with a bit of the opposing truth at the end of 1-Man No-Show. So I deduct a half-star because, with my more earnest taste, in an otherwise titillating hour of carefully honed slop that balances inanity, annoyance, and charm, I admit I wanted something more than bazongas behind the schticky layers. I’m still left wondering: what’s behind the pasties, Mr. Kessler?
Interprète | Performer Isaac Kessler
Reviewed by Stephen Daytime.
Photos: Kevin Rife.
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