PERFORMANCE & COMEDY

Comedy Box at the Hen and Chicken, Bristol (Fri 14-Sat 15 Oct)

COMEDY Two very different acts, on tour with each other, hit the Comedy Box over the weekend. Short, round and with a strong Devonian accent, Charlie Baker didn’t offer us a stand-up show so much as a perverted twist on light entertainment. There’s plenty of audience interaction, like when he directs the audience in a re-enactment of a scene from a Devon cattle auction, or takes audience requests for very specific accents (such as West Street, Phoenix, Arizona), all of which end up sounding exactly the same. There’s also a fair few uninspired cock jokes and some oh-so-funny assertions that a man at the front of the audience is gay, which might go down better with a boozier, less discerning audience.

A hard act to classify, then, but with enough surreal fascination to keep most of us interested. Our headliner is the far more conventional Josh Widdicombe (pictured), a tousle-haired young comic with plenty of Bristol experience, having cut his teeth at various of Mark Olver’s student nights over the last few years. His first full show is full of comically pedantic nit-picking, as he finds fault with everything from down-to-Earth homilies like ‘it’s better to have loved and lost...’ (not the attitude that we take when we lose anything else, he points out: “Oh well, at least I had a phone...”) to the exhibitions at Madame Tussauds - how is that Anneka Rice has been melted down due to her flagging popularity, but Adolf Hitler is still standing?

It’s a show stuffed with smart observations, held together by a persona that seems genuinely flustered by the world’s small idiocies. I do have one pedantic quibble of my own: Widdicombe’s delivery is a little monotonous, rising to an incredulous soprano at the end of almost every joke. He might do well to tone this down, if only for his own sanity - it must be exhausting to go through life so permanently perplexed. (Tom Hackett)

Copyright Tom Hackett 2011