Lynn Ruth Miller: Granny's Gone Wild
Live Review

Seventy-seven-year-old Lynn Ruth Miller likes to portray herself as a sexually predatory pensioner. Not so much a cougar, she quips, more a sabre-tooth tiger.

But the sex angle is overplayed, once the surprise of a slaggy granny talking dirty has worn off, it’s down to the quality of the jokes – and there are rather too many easy dick and fanny gags here. She tries to make a theme of it, stringing so many lines together of the formula ‘In my day a pearl necklace was…’ but it gets wearisome. Lasciviously flirting with a up-for-it young man is playful and fun, but generic filth is another thing entirely.

Her delivery style is old-fashioned – who’d have thunk it? – following the typical American style where every fact about her is immediately followed by a joke. When this works, it’s hugely efficient (‘I used to play cruise ships. I did the Mayflower…’) but with weaker payoffs it can feel like a coldly mechanical technique.

And that doesn’t fit in with Miller’s personality. She’s a uniquely warm, optimistic performer with a palpable joy at being on stage that easily transmits to the audience, especially when she moves away from the cheaper lines. This sassy San Francisco resident has some fun stories about dating in the 50s and how it compares to today, when her dates arrive with hearing aids at best, and on a gurney at worse.

But for every self-deprecating line about her bad driving or travails in love, we get predictable punchlines about fingers in dykes, beating about the bush or boobs down by her feet. Despite being as old as Joan Rivers, Miller is still a relatively new convert to stand-up, and is making the rookie mistake of going for cheap below-the-belt humour when there’s so much more comedy inside of her.

Not that I would want to teach a grandmother how to suck eggs, mind…