Review by Steve Bennett

If their publicity is to believed, the Heavyweight Comedy Jam is something of a phenomenon in South Africa, regularly filling 5,000-seat venues in the towns they visit.

But it’s a success they’ll find impossible to replicate in Britain, as their showcase at London’s Lyric Theatre conclusively demonstrated, because these comics, almost to a man, cannot play to an international crowd.

Their parochial comedy relies so heavily on local references - and even the ability to understand Afrikaans punchlines – that Brits, like me, are left baffled for the most part.

Not that the almost exclusively expat crowd could care. So far away from their mother country, simply hearing a familiar accent reminding them of the people and places of home was enough to get a hugely appreciative laugh of recognition.

But the very best comedy transcends its references, using a distinctively personal perspective to illuminate universal themes, rather than lazily rely on some shared set of common reference points.

South Africa is a fascinating country, the fledgling Rainbow Nation optimistically trying to forge a genuinely multiracial future from an iniquitous past, despite such terrible problems as Aids and crime. But we heard precious little about this.

Race did play its part, however. There’s a willingness to mock those from different backgrounds that British comics typically fight shy of, afraid of being tainted with associations to the genuinely unpleasant shtick of dinosaurs like Bernard Manning. But here the motivation seems much more healthy, an affectionate teasing that’s an essential part of any coexistence.

That said, the comedy would have been stronger had the acts, whatever their hue, looked beyond formula and easy, stereotypical character traits for their routines. Great white shark? Imagine a great black shark, or a great coloured one, or a great Indian one, mused headliner John Vlismas, pictured, just after David Kau had considered how train drivers from the same four groups might differently react to an impeding crash and telling us ‘black people on strike protest like this… while white people on strike protest like this.’

It’s a very simplistic approach, but one the audience – as multicoloured as a pack of M&Ms – lapped up with raucous laughs, deafening hollers and a few exaggerated convulsions and clicking their fingers high in the air.

Kau was the worst offender at this uninspired comedy-by-numbers; even doing a gag that after being surprised seeing white people driving the buses and taxis in London he searched in vain for fellow black people… until he went to KFC. What? When the premise of the gag is that you can’t find a black person in central London and the punchline is that all they do is eat fried chicken, you really ought to go back to the drawing board.

At the other end of the spectrum, the stand-out star was Riaad Moosa, right, a Muslim doctor with a fine routine about his post 9/11 experiences and probably the only act of the night with unqualified international appeal. He’s not the first Asian comic to speak of their difficulties with air travel, but his routine on the subject is impeccable: funny, unpredictable and well paced, each sharp line brilliantly topping the last. He was in the UK three years ago, as part of a South African showcase at the Edinburgh Fringe, and his presence and timing have sharpened considerably since then.

Opening the show, the low-key Drew Carey lookalike Chris Forrest had some good material, too. Some clever wordplay and an inspired routine about immigration control at Heathrow demonstrated his clear abilities as a comic writer.

Closer Vlismas’s standing earned him the longest set, which ranged wildly in style and content. Sitting alongside his relatively uninspired takes on race, sex and George Bush’s idiocy, was some rare topical material in which he skilfully drew attention to some of the bizarre foibles of the South African government and a delightfully silly aside about giraffes. But he was too inconsistent to really leave a lasting impression.

Between the two, the young Loyiso Gola had an appealing energy inspired by America’s Def Comedy Jam, although his promising style was not matched by sufficiently distinctive material; David Kibuuka offered some nice ideas about SA’s many official languages and the ridiculousness of the name Humpty Dumpty, but failed to capitalise on them with his overlong routines; impressionist Martin Jonas’s voices were enthusiastically received, so I’ll have to assume they were spot-on though I’ve no idea who his targets were; and Darren Simpson’s delightfully teasing delivery couldn’t rescue pedestrian material.

The night was a mixed bag, as any such showcase will almost inevitably be. But if this was genuinely the start of an attempt to expand the Heavyweight Comedy Jam brand into Britain, as host Alex Jay indicated, the producers have to do a lot more to find acts who can appeal beyond the very limited demographic of expat South Africans.

Steve Bennett

Lyric Theatre Shaftesbury Avenue

May 28, 2006

Review date: 1 Jan 2006
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett