Richard Morton’s calling isn’t so much comedian as salesman. He takes the cheapest tat, well past its sell-by date, and with sheer force of personality gets the audience to lap it up.
He’s been peddling the same line in generic comedy every night for nearly 20 years – and twice a night on weekends – but you’d barely know it. He feigns the same spontaneity and vigour every time, rabble-rousing the crowd with a tidal wave of Geordie bonhomie. Only when you see him twice do you realise the spiel’s the same day in, day out. To exude such enthusiasm time after time for the same old gags is a skill in itself.
But boy, don’t the subjects seem old. Women aren’t like men, you feel shit when you’ve got a hangover and here are some chat-up lines you might like to use. That’s about the extent of it – the things anyone who’s ever been drunk or tried to pull can identify without ever engaging their brain. One of the biggest laughs of the set comes from the hoary old line ‘you don’t sweat much for a fat lass’, which hardly shows a man trying to get anything but get the easiest laughs.
He sets much of this to music, a key weapon in his armoury to defeat an audience as he moans about women or how relationships are sure to turn to shit, all set to a jaunty tune. Romantic, it ain’t – in fact, it’s ultimately rather a depressing picture of relationships that he paints – but swept along by Morton’s unflagging energy and the punch the music packs, the audience care not.
