Tiffany Stevenson

Original Review:

Tiffany Stevenson has a detached style, delivering her bone-dry material with authority, but minimal emotional engagement – giving her a bored, unapproachable air.

Her persona has a kernel of likeability, so this thick-skinned stance is possibly a defence mechanism to allow her to plough on against crowd hostility or indifference. But it makes her come across as indifferent, too, and that does not make for high spirits.

With brilliant material, this wouldn’t matter, but Stevenson is inconsistent here, with many gags that are confused or just not particularly funny. As the host of her own respected new material night – London’s Red Rope – you would have thought she had the ideal testing ground to secure a higher hit rate.

Occasionally, though, she comes up with a good line. Her unsalubrious hometown of Greenford, an anonymous suburban sprawl on the fringes of West London, offers the richest vein of comedy, with half a dozen good jokes about the chavvy residents and teenage mums who live there. It’s familiar modern territory, but she finds strong gags of her own within it.

For someone who only started comedy in early 2005, Stevenson has come on remarkably quickly, often securing decent bookings and appearing alongside many of the best comics in the country. But there are areas where her relative inexperience is reflected in her work, which needs an injection of more personality – not to mention jokes – if she’s to match the elevated company she keeps. Date of review: Oct 2007

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