Tim Harding's comedy diary

Reviewer Tim Harding gives a rundown of the comedy he's been watching in the last two weeks.

Given that the major film studios long ago made it clear that they’re no longer willing to fund motion picture comedies, it’s taken the comedy industry a few years to come around to the idea of producing them on the cheap, but I’m hopeful that Conner O’Malley is going to inspire some of his colleagues.

The cult US comedian has been uploading great, weird short films to his YouYube channel for a few years, all of which are worth seeking out. He’s been very clever in making a virtue of budgetary limitations, shooting on phones and coming up with smart in-narrative reasons for his films to have a found-footage look. 

His latest film, Rap World, is also his longest at 55 minutes, and has been playing film festivals around the States, giving a much-needed veneer of artistic legitimacy to comedy on film. It helps that it’s also one of the better films you’ll see this year, regardless of genre.

O’Malley stars alongside Jack Bensinger and Eric Rahill as a trio of small-town fuckups who are trying to record their groundbreaking first album in a single night but keep getting distracted by ex-girlfriends, trips to get burgers and the allure of dicking around with trolleys in supermarket car parks. 

Like all the best comedy films it’s an affectionate ode to the world’s dumbest assholes, drawing on the particular flavour of suburban America in the mid-2000s and imbued with its own kind of poetry. 

Give it a few years and you’ll be able to point out a number of cult favourites making early appearances here. As well as Bensinger, Rahill and Nate Varrone from the Joy Tactics podcast, you can spot boundary-pushing stand-ups like Dan Licata, Sarah Squirm and Rachel Kaly, and all three members of the anarchic Podcast About List, the funniest podcast currently coming out of America.

Another big name of the future, Emma Sidi brought her Fringe show Emma Sidi Is Sue Gray to the Soho Theatre, pushing her character comedy to its limit with a whole show dedicated to a single persona, the titular high-ranking bureaucrat who she plays as a kind of East End wide girl, turning parliamentary intrigues into Towie-coded gossip and drama seshes around the water cooler. 

It’s a fantastic character, and joins the great comedic tradition of impressions that become iconic by deliberately swerving away from any basis in reality. Like Leigh Francis’ Craig David, Vic Reeves’ Loyd Grossman or Bob Mortimer’s entire English Premier League, it’s an impression that’s so far off the mark that it becomes more vivid and real than the person it portrays.

As a narrative, it’s kind of slack. It has a few sections in Spanish that are the highlights of the show but really don’t have anything to do with the character as established, plus a number of extended water breaks, and I think even Sidi would own up to the fact that it fizzles out at the end with a half-hearted stab at a message, but it’s still among the funnier shows of the year, based on Sidi’s performance alone – she’s really an exceptional character comedian.

Happily, it seems to have found its intended audience at Soho Theatre. Sidi’s Edinburgh run this year was her highest profile yet (partly due to the Taskmaster bump) but was reportedly dogged by a preponderance of sleepy elders in the audience who seemed to be expecting more traditional political satire. 

Even during the performance I attended, there was some minor disruption from a handful of Spad types who didn’t quite get the conceit. It’s an interesting example of how increasing your audience reach is not always beneficial to the show.

Finally, Daniel Kitson brought his new show Pith to the Bill Murray for an evening, the purpose of which performance was unclear, aside from as a pit stop between its initial run in Manchester and presumably some future engagement. 

For me, Kitson provokes complicated feelings. The first time I saw him I had the same revelatory feelings as everyone else, and I think I’ll always be a fan, but I sometimes can’t help feeling that we’ve lost one of our greatest ever comedians to a much more middling playwright. 

Pith is a storytelling show about a woman on a bus and a man on a bench, delivered in monologue with the aid of a notebook full of Post-its – a symptom of Kitson’s preoccupation with the analogue that often features in his narratives as well. Much of the action in this story centres around cassette tapes, which Kitson uses for their own spice of Gen X romanticism. 

That sense of romanticism is the foundation on which all his plays are based, and it’s what most limits him as a writer. His stories are universally set in a cosy, whimsical version of middle England, and feature good-hearted people discussing love and longing in its simplest, most knitwear-friendly form, surrounded by mugs of tea and packs of biscuits.

Listening to his stories you hear the voice of someone who’s never reckoned with the reality or the practicalities of love: the passion, the anger, the resignation, the loss; even the true ecstasy of it is smothered. His phraseology may be sharper, but in his own way he’s gloopier and more sentimental than Richard Curtis.

It's telling that in one of his many asides, he mentions that his male lead is 'the first character [he’s] ever written with curly hair.' If you’re thinking that that speaks of a narrow purview for a playwright, I’m right there with you. As usual, he finds much greater poetic truth in his observational stand-up than in the interactions between his unrealistic characters.

On the other hand (and it’s a big hand) he remains transcendent off the cuff, and this show more than most of his storytelling works has found a way to fully incorporate all the asides and deviations to the narrative that make it so enjoyable. In those moments, it takes flight, and every time it returns to the bus and the bench it’s like a lead weight around its ankles. 

The show’s dramatic and thematic shortcomings are concealed by its many great impact lines, and Kitson at one point mentions that his process is largely focused around uncovering those lines. 

I would venture to suggest it’s a case of iron pyrite here. Great lines are great, but if he really wants to move beyond his status as the greatest stand-up of his generation (and I think he does), he could do so by putting the cool lines aside and opening up to the world as it really is, rather than writing it as he wishes it could be.

Kitson photo: © davidxgreen / Alamy Stock Photo

Published: 11 Nov 2024