Review by Steve Bennett

Well here’s a turn-up. A Just For Laugh gala host’s sketch which is genuinely, brilliantly funny. Often these set pieces are extravagant spectacles with big budgets, big stars, but scripts that are more likely to make you cringe than laugh. But, thanks to the writing influence of John Cleese, his opening routine was something of a gem.

‘For me it’s over,’ he announces. ‘I am finished. I used to be hilarious. Look at me now, reduced to hosting pointless comedy festivals, introducing hack comics and pretending to find them funny.’ The only solution to preserve his legacy, he sombrely announces, is to kill himself at the end of the show and go out with a flourish.

It’s a set-up that opens the door for an inspired Eulogy full of tongue-in-cheek self-aggrandising pomposity, winding up the audience and bitching deliciously about fellow performers. The formula is repeated in two subsequent sketches, one seeking his replacement in a Cleese Idol talent show, the second choosing his method of death. They’re subject to the law of diminishing returns, yet always retain their ability to amuse – something of a triumph for the festival’s writers to match the coup in getting a legend as big as Cleese here in the first place.

The first act he introduced was Andrew Kennedy, a half-Colombian, half-English comic, with a routine much reliant on his background – although it’s certainly unusually to hear a posh British voice when it comes to a comic doing their ‘wacky ethnic parent’ bit. He was interesting enough to hold the audience’s attention through this, and stories of his son’s lack of self-censorship – but laughs weren’t always coming thick and fast.

Mike MacDonald has appeared in 22 Just For Laughs festivals in a row. Maybe he’s being funny in instalments, doing just one tiny good bit each year. ‘I’ve been to three comedians’ wakes,’ is his bizarre opening line. ‘Mitch Hedberg, Bill Hicks and Sam Kinison.’ But this baffling posthumous namedropping was, incomprehensibly, the start of an unrelated routine about the less-than-gripping subject of finding a parking space in Los Angeles. An aside mocking the standard cinematic shot of a man being shot in a car and slumping on to the horn was the only good moment in this lacklustre set.

Self-confessed hillbilly Jon Reep was the first act to realise the knock-on goodwill he could get by back-introducing John Cleese – suggesting he’s not as dumb as the redneck image would have you believe. He starts unexcitingly – it’s not long before we get the incest line inevitably associated with any rural backwater, for instance – but when he fleshes out the stereotypes with a purportedly true story about his own father’s stupidity, the set really soars, much to the crowd’s delight.

Their reaction to Stewart Lee was more muted. An early line describing the Catholic church as his ‘favourite form of clandestine global evil’ elicits a collective intake of breath, and as the edgy material continues, cutaway shots show well-to-do punters (who can afford up to £85 for seat) chuckling guiltily into their hands. But Lee is most certainly funny, and the consensus gradually grows in his favour – though in the very limited time allotted to him, he’s never going to convert everyone.

Demographically targeted sketch group Women Fully Clothed made two appearances tonight, singing toe-curlingly twee songs about mammograms and a housewife’s struggle to prepare a varied menu for her family – with not the faintest trace of irony. Dreadful, dated stuff that could set the women’s movement back decades, but sung wonderfully. There was more non-comedy later with the graceful acrobat Adam Walker, striking a series of impressive poses on a rope. At least he wasn’t meant to be funny.

Alan Park provides the second unexpected British reference point of the night – with a routine about Coronation Street. He started of at cracking pace, with a string of one-liners about his lack of sex life, but it soon fizzled out, ending with a tired routine about the Queen Mum’s death – so young – four years after the event.

‘I’m black. I’m American. I don’t know how this is going to work out,’ Todd Lynn semi-apologetically introduces himself. But with his bottomless reserves of forceful energy, things were never going to go badly for him. His brisk set skipped from ‘green’ cars to rappers glorifying jail, from his cake-induced late-onset diabetes to Google, getting better as he went on. Some of the writing lacks the punch of the performance, but he’s got enough of an angle to make for a very appealing package.

Imagine Tony Soprano doing stand-up, and you’ve got Rocky Laporte – a no-nonsense Italian-American whose throaty bass voice and rhythmic speech patterns are a comic godsend. Some material feels old – ‘my wife wants to have sex two, three times a month. What am I? A machine?’ – but most is better than that – and his impassioned intolerance of all the dumb morons who make his life difficult make for a great attitude. It’s almost enough to make you forget John Cleese’s tragic demise.

Review date: 1 Jan 2006
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett