Minchin should have been here a month ago - but he had to do some Secret Policeman's Ball gig and Mark Thomas substituted. Here we got a post-punk and pre-crusty audience, more mohicans than I've seen in the Carbuncle before. It was also an audience who whooped a lot - and I was thinking - he's walked on stage, wow, so what? Clearly a cult already - a red-tinged Tim Burton, not quite dreadlocked, mostly singing songs at the piano, with some just at the mike and some with guitar, and sometimes backing tapes. After his electro start, and worrying about empty seats (it was meant to be sold out) he started with
Taboo", song about prejudice and forbidden words, particularly a six letter one: a couple of Gs, an N, an I, an E and an R. Ah, it's not going to be what you think, I thought, and it wasn't.
He was clearly clever, but I was wondering if he was too clever. His religious "I Love Jesus" draws the audience into questioning prejudice - although lumps Christian altogether. His
"If I didn't have you" undercuts the love song, suggesting that if he didn't have his girlfriend then, well, plenty more fish in the sea: "I mean you are special, but within a bell curve." This is a man who has at least some knowledge of science (and can sing a lyric saying he'd rather have dinner with Richard Dawkins than Desmond Tutu), and if evolution is a theory, he'd like fundamentalists to test the theory of gravity, too. Equally he undercuts political earnestness with male desire and self-deprecation and his wife's pragmatism - when watching a DVD with her, he fears his baby has a probably, and she reasons if there's something wrong it'd spoil the DVD and it'll still be wrong when the DVD was over. (He also discusses crossed lines in comedy.)
The interval had a special piece of music in which he sings "It's the interval song", although it would have been smarter not to point this out.
The second half featured some audience participation in
"Bears Don't Dig On Dancing", although I think the participant (
guitarmadfreak) enjoyed himself in the end. The attacked link shows Minchin wearing what he had in this gig - frilled shirt and bare feet (aside from the song in which he wears one boot). Self reflectively he sing the
"You Tube Lament", complaining about the lack of hits.
If You Open Your Mind Too Much" is sceptical about psychics, astrology and homeopathy (if water can remember medicine why has it forgotten poo?). I can't find his song on
Grauniad critic, Phil Daoust. Oh
"Dark Side". [Bonus: his review of
Donnie Darko - with spoilers]
Manford, meanwhile, has a Channel Four (teen and twenty-something, with dads) audience, and looks a bit like Peter Kaye (he's from nearby and does similar observational stuff). Again plagued by late-comers, and does the asking members of the audience stuff before he starts (he is his own support act). Not laugh out-loud funny, to my taste, but amusing. Lots of stuff on men urinating, and its politics, and really coming alive in the encore when he confronted the heckler: "You've paid to come to a stand-up gig and you're telling your own jokes and
I'm the dick? What next? Going to a brothel and giving yourself a blowjob?" And chiming with Minchin -
( cut in case you haven't watched 'Taboo' )![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
