Joe Munrow: Indoor Fox Hunting at 2011 Brighton Fringe
Note: This review is from 2011
Joe Munrow has been around three years or so, but has remained largely under the radar. On the strength of this sparsely attended show, he’s a perfectly reasonable newish act, adept on stage but overstretching himself with his first unthemed full-length show. I guess you have to start somewhere, but it’s a massive leap for a comedian not yet playing 20 minutes in clubs to go into an hour.
He also comes across as a product of study – whether he’s done a comedy course or is merely well-versed in the artform – and so feels very much as if he’s playing to the archetype, rather than revealing his personality. When he gets angry about paninis or Slankets, he is following a stand-up convention, as if he’s sat down to write routines as an exercise, rather than having any genuine take on these trivial topics. And routines often spin-out into the sort of easy surrealism in which you can conjure up wombats with banjos for knees without really putting much invention or internal logic into it.
He’s a vivacious performer, a working-class London lad with an infectious vigour and easy charm, although prone to peppering his speech with too many ‘you know what I mean’s and other distracting tics. But it’s a natural performance as long as he sticks to the conversational, the little scenes he acts out complete with self-conscious, well-practised ‘mistakes’ don’t ring true at all.
The show – a fluid hour hurriedly compressed into 40 or so minutes thanks to a late start – has its moments, but even these are often so similar to much stand-up that’s gone before – boisterous children on the bus, another suggestion of the dream Martin Luther King had – that it doesn’t dwell in the memory.
When you boil it down, this is a few good gags, 15 minutes of above-par open mic material and a lot of flannel. The boy’s got chutzpah – he just hasn’t got an hour.
Review date: 20 May 2011
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at:
Brighton The Temple