Review by Steve Bennett

Seasoned? Vintage? Steadfast? Will Durst is looking for an adjective to replace the obvious one: old. At 63 years – or 23,153 days, if you prefer – he’s not even that dilapidated; but as a member of the baby boomer generation who’ve seen free-love hedonism, slowing down and becoming a senior citizen is a hard pill to swallow.

So this is a show about the changes he’s seen, both to himself and to the world, told by a man with a lifetime’s experience of telling jokes. To put it in context, in the year he was nominated for the Perrier, 1989, last year’s award winner, John Kearns, was just two.

He might, then, be forgiven for not being cutting edge; and there are plenty of ideas in here that a frequent comedy-goer will have heard before. He even wanted to call it Where’s My Jetpack?, the epitome of hack on the broken promises of old sci-fi movies, without apparent irony.

So we hear – yet again – about the lost joy of slamming down the phone or rewinding cassettes with a pencil; the grunts and groans it now requires to get up from a chair – hell, he even uses Billy Connolly’s famous line about being buried with his bum-crack showing above the soil. There are gripes about autocorrect, reminisces of the days when there were only four TV channels; and a brief rant about how marriage equality is a no-brainer.

But while Durst might slip on originality, the execution is as faultless as you might expect from a performer to whom stand-up has become second nature.

The hour is jam-packed with punchlines allowing him to cover so much ground and with a gag every other beat. He’s not just chewing the fat; it’s pared down to a dense package of jokes, the cumulative effect of which is irresistible. The way he expresses even the most familiar of ideas is classy. A routine about the complexities of using a modern, motion-controlled public toilet is a delight; as is the frustration he vocalises as trying to devise an internet password that meets the required security standards.

He’s perfectly on the wavelength of his generation with every observation eliciting a laugh of recognition from this sparsely attended preview. And perhaps never more so than when he’s applying his social satire to the entitled kids of the current generation.

For all his entertainingly grouchy gripes, Durst is astutely aware of the cycles that every age group goes through with its elders and its progenies. And he ultimately has an uplifting carpe diem message for his peers – a motto he’s determined to live by.

Like so much of his comedy, that probably won’t actually change any attitudes. But the hour still provides a rewarding masterclass in the craft of stand-up from a consummate pro.

Review date: 8 Aug 2015
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Gilded Balloon Teviot