Wade McElwain: The Littlest Hobo
Live Review

In an aside, Wade McElwain complains that, despite 16 years in the business, he’s not more famous because he’s ‘not a 22-year-old doing seven minutes that’s not funny; people don’t want comedians like me’.

It’s a bitter thought from a downhearted, broke, middle-aged comic. But he’s as much of a type as a pretty boy with a drama-school diploma, a pretty face and a head full of more hair-gel than attitude – and despite, or perhaps because of, his years of experience, McElwain’s only competent at his brand of stand-up, rather than feeling exciting.

That style is the grubbily depraved road comic, where every joke is about sex and drugs. There’s material about old-school porn compared to the stuff on the internet, about fat chicks and their unlikely excuses about being ‘big-boned’ about how every guy is a base pig ruled by their dick. Oh it’s not all this: apparently kids who cry on planes are annoying, too, and foreign people talk funny, as occasionally demonstrated by McElwain’s moderately racist accents.

There is a place for this – it’s called Jongleurs – but it’s not sophisticated, fresh or exciting enough to warrant an hour of attention from sober people. Not that everyone in the modest audience of this late-night gig was sober. One chap muttered like Butthead though the first half of McElwain’s set, then suddenly made great show of walking out. Until then, the 39-year-old Canadian hadn’t addressed the issue, though, as he was too obsessed with chatting to the giggling 21-year-olds in the front row, and in doing so neglected the rest of the room, I suppose it proves his ‘ruled by the dick’ theory.

To be fair to him, he does sometimes move away from the overly-familiar, as he talks about growing up in a remote corner of Ontario. And he’s got a decent supply of good one-liners, normally apropros of nothing, which he drops like diamonds in the rough.

But generally he didn’t seem focussed on the job in hand, phoning in his undemanding material. Acts like Jim Jefferies can inject enough personality into the crude to elevate it into something more sublime. McElwain is not that sort of a comic.