Edinburgh Fringe 2026
Chip and Gus: A Comedy with Balls
Fat Knight Theatre (New York City)
Genre: Theatre
Venue: theSpace @ Venue 45
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Chip and Gus have balls. Lots of balls. More balls than you’d expect for two ageing, lonely men who meet every third Tuesday of the month in a dingy back room of a bar in Schenectady, upstate New York.
Both Chip and Gus are from another planet. They’re academics, you see. One doesn’t do phones of any description and the other is never off his. And they talk. And talk. And talk some more in what’s a waterfall of words for sixty minutes. Covering every topic known to humankind.
Review
Chip and Gus have balls. Lots of balls. More balls than you’d expect for two ageing, lonely men who meet every third Tuesday of the month without fail to play ping pong (or, to give it its original English name, “whiff whaff”) in a dingy back room of a bar in Schenectady, upstate New York.
Except for last month when Gus blew Chip out. Didn’t show. Forgot to tell Chip that he was giving a prestigious philosophy lecture somewhere out of town. And Gus doesn’t have a smartphone. In fact, he barely does phones at all. His long-suffering secretary handles such mundanities for him.
Chip and Gus : A Comedy with Balls opens with Chip, a failing musician/composer turned tertiary educator, pacing rapidly around the back room in the bar, ear glued to phone, as he frantically removes the detritus from the table tennis table, preparing the room for their evening game. Assuming that Gus shows, of course. Last time Chip’s evening was only rescued when a friendly lady bartender took Gus’s place. It just wasn’t the same. Couldn’t be. Not without the Dr Gus Reisman, author of fourteen books, renowned lecturer, Chair of Philosophy at the same institution as Chip, with a penchant for pedantry that would drive any sane human being to distraction.
Eventually Gus shows, struggling with myriad carrier bags containing refreshments for the evening together with a sizeable bag of balls. You see, ever the academic seeking perfection, Gus has decided that bending down to pick up the table tennis ball at the end of a rally wastes time and energy. And, in his portly case, it’s undignified. So, why bother? Just hook a container of balls onto the side of the table and pick one out of that. More time to play, less unnecessary energy dissipated. Given their respective ages, that’s got to be a good thing, right?
That’s basically set the scene for what turns into one of the quaintest, idiosyncratic pieces of comedy, sorry, theatre you’re likely to stumble across this Fringe. Because Chip and Gus just talk. And talk. And talk some more. At about 180 words per minute for most of the hour or so of this two-hander of a show. Most of the time they’re playing ping pong, or “gnop gnip” as Gus likes to call it, just to demonstrate his academic superiority. Not “gnip gnop”, please note, as that’s not strictly “ping pong” in reverse, given that, in reverse, “pong” would need to be the first reversed word.
That, and the many and varied other inane subjects that litter this superbly delivered piece of theatre, illustrates the attention to the minutiae endemic in the script, written by the two performers John Ahlin (the urbane Gus) and Christopher Patrick Mullen (the perpetually frenetic Chip). It’s basically a waterfall of words, pouring over the audience in torrents, leaving different parts laughing at different things at different times as the wit percolates individual brains.
And everyone in a pretty packed theSpaceUK @ Venue 45 auditorium laughed at something they said, sometime. Some of us were in stitches most of the time, which probably meant we missed something. No matter, there’d soon be another bit of whimsy, surrealism or plain old absurdity to cotton on to.
But, as the evening wears on and the balls fly to all parts, the true poignancy of Chip’s existence on the fringes of academia is revealed, causing a gradual but growing warmth between the couple to emerge from the silliness of their interactions. That the rather tender denouement comes a bit from left field matters not one wit. It’s believable, largely because Ahlin and Mullen are Gus and Chip. They don’t play these parts, they inhabit them, which is what makes this a spellbinding piece of theatrical storytelling.
This is “thinking folks” comedy, definitely a show for those who love words. But it will work on pretty much any level. And, if you find yourself completely lost as to the point of it all, just marvel at how Ahlin and Mullen play a semi-competitive game of whiff whaff whilst both talking at nineteen to the dozen. Worth the ticket price on its own.
