Joe Munrow: Indoor Fox Hunting at 2011 Brighton Fringe
Live Review
Brighton The Temple

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.