These online comedy gigs courtesy of the Comedy Crate and the Atic have proved very successful so the initial plan for four Sundays throughout February has extended into March, and I for one am delighted about that! It’s a great way to relax into your Sunday evening before preparing for another Monday of Big Business and Commercial Challenges… sorry, I mean, staying at home and not knowing what day it is from one day to the next.
Our regular host Ryan Mold welcomed us all on board with his bright, cheery presence and some great new material including an embarrassing remote conversation with people on a bus, and the joys of being colour-blind. It’s much more difficult to engage with a zoom audience than a conventional audience because there’s no hiding place in a regular club or theatre, whereas online you can pretend not to hear or indeed just switch your cam off whilst you go and cook the evening meal! But he does a great job at keeping us all involved.
It was a five-act show last night – virtually Shakespearean in construct. First off the block was Scott Bennett, whom we saw a few years ago supporting Rob Brydon at the Royal and Derngate and he was brilliant. Again yesterday he has a fantastic, lively presence with great, surefooted delivery and heaps of material to share. I loved all his observations about taking kids on an aeroplane, his printer being his mortal enemy and, most of all, those unromantic evenings when you’re “trying for a baby”. The jokes were overflowing as was the laughter. A really great start.
Next up was Paul F Taylor, whom we’d also seen at a Screaming Blue Murder seven years ago. He has a terrific zany approach to his comedy with a nice balance of the surreal and the stupid. Last night he did a great routine about how one of your hands is a reliable tool all your life but the other is a hanger-on – very funny. I also liked his exploration of which professions are suffering most during lockdown. I’m not sure the zoom medium works that well for his particular comedic style; you can tell he yearns for interpersonal stage connections to make things flow for the best. But he has great material and has a very likeable stage persona.
Middle act, and a last minute change to our schedule, was Jenny Collier. New to us, I liked how she uses her Queen’s English accent to shock with the use of the C word! In fact she didn’t hold back from discussing some of the seamier sides of life, but it was all done with great timing and a very engaging personality. She had some great material about doing the NHS clap in a Welsh village, and also the very recognisable observations about life as a GP receptionist. Very enjoyable!
Next came Jack Gleadow, also new to us, and clearly a naturally funny guy, with a great feel for language (I loved his malapropism for Covid) and silliness (as in his impression of David Attenborough). He was also responsible for my favourite joke of the night, concerning comments made on porn videos, and we were his brief, but very funny, participants in his Meet The Audience section. He’s definitely someone we’d like to see IRL (as the young people say) when this is all over.
And our headline act was the marvellous Troy Hawke, Milo McCabe’s brilliant Clark Gable lookalike comic creation, and probably the only person on a zoom call who’d naturally don a smoking jacket. Again, he’s another comic who thrives on the interaction with the audience – we’ve seen him do Spank! in Edinburgh a few times – which is a challenge on zoom but he rises to it superbly, remarking on people’s living rooms, camera angles, lighting and so on – a perfect alternative to teasing them in person. His unexpected accents – such as that of the Glaswegian audience member – are terrifically funny as they’re so at odds with Troy’s own voice and demeanour. I really enjoyed his material about impostor syndrome and nurses versus influencers. An excellent way to end the evening.
I’m already booked for next week’s show which has the promise of some terrific acts – are you?