25/01/2010 Our deliciously sardonic new scribe, Olivia Laven-Morris, considers the leftfield comedic talents on display at the legendary Chuckle Club’s 24th birthday bash in London this month.
A little bit musical comedy always does it for me. It is still a fresh new format, and when you throw poetic comedy into the mix is creates a delightful platform on which to puncture the inflated ego of popular culture. So I was excited to see comedians who excel at these mediums at the chuckle club. A venue which presents a great mix of complete unknowns, better known alternative comedians, and even the downright famous ones, often all in the same night. Simon Munnery, Danny Hurt, Kevin Eldon and Stewart Lee were a wonderful cross section of exactly this sort of variety. My optimism was crushed however, when i had one of those unfortunate nights when, despite downing a glass of wine that tasted worryingly like peanut flavoured toilet cleaner, I appeared to be the only one not laughing along. Was I missing something? I leave it to you to judge.....
Simon Munnery got the show off to a start with a brief musical musing on his conversion to Catholicism entitled; 'I'm much better at copin' since I let the Pope in', but his subjects were un-engaging and lacked the credibility necessary to make the audience laugh along knowingly. It was only once he started to talk about his family that his routine began to pick up, (his inefficacy and bemusement at the casual violence of his toddler was one of the highlights). Comedians often find a raft of new and improved material suddenly becomes available to them with the advent of a family, injecting new life into their stand up. Munnery appeared to go through this process of enlightenment within this routine alone.
Unfortunately for Danny Hurt, such comedic opportunities appear to have passed him by, and having left the audience with the rather disturbing and implausible statement that he used to be a rent boy, (thankfully he did not elaborate), he then went on to explain that although he has a family, he didn't have anything to say about them. A wasted opportunity perhaps, although he had lost the audience long before then.
The third act, Big Train, Jam, Black Books, etc, alumni Kevin Eldon assumed a 'be-jumpered poet' alter ego named Paul Hamilton. Beginning with a joke on 'face-tube' and 'my-book', (have we had enough of these yet?), he quickly picked up the audience and built his material with a consistent and unfaltering delivery. I was unimpressed with his his laboured jokes, ('I have a frog in my throat, but that doesn't mean I'm fellating a Frenchman' springs to mind)....but I appear to have been the only one. The audience loved it.
The outré leftfield Stewart Lee concluded the evening, whose best gag by far was a brutal but amusing character assassination of Richard Hammond, with whom he claims to have been at school. He covered the age-old townie dilemma of moving to the country with aplomb, with a blunt assessment of the usual entertainment at the local corn exchange, (an unconsummated incestuous frisson between that brother and sister who came second on X factor, Paddy McGuiness and his joke...) although it is a subject that has been covered with greater scorn and insight by comedians such as Dylan Moran. His section on the smugness of British émigrés (he observes that there appears to be a strong link between 'the quality of life' enjoyed abroad and the massiveness of the prawns) made the audience laugh long and loud.
Lee's caustic wit and deadpan delivery serve him well, although his lack of emotion make his tirades against his bugbears less believable, and his comedy suffers for it. Believing the comedian means what he says is the key to all good comedy, and a little animation might lend some credibility to Lee's performance. Without more enthusiasm or even more anger for his subjects, Lee risks becoming a poor man's Jack Dee. He is just as dead-pan, but not as wonderfully full of hate.
--Olivia Laven-Morris
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