Review by Steve Bennett

Lee Camp follows an esteemed line of ranty political comedians that reached its apex with George Carlin.

Like the late polemicist, Camp has an evangelical zeal – and sometimes the preachiness to match. But the sobering information he imparts explains exactly why he has such passion; and you can’t help but end up feeling slightly guilty for frittering away an hour in a comedy show when there’s a revolution to be plotted.

The targets are what you might expect from a fervently left-wing political comic, but he dismisses them with a ruthless efficiency, deploying facts and sarcasm like Obama deploys drone strikes. Of course there was outrage over the civilian deaths these unmanned planes were inflicting, and the President listened... and changed the definition of ‘civilian’. It is DoubleSpeak at it’s most terrifying, and that Camp can find funny in this is quite some achievement. He does it by pointing out that peanuts cause more deaths in the US than terrorism, so where’s the war on legumes?

Other topics pretty much throw themselves onto his political spike. Fox News is easy to mock – especially after a survey showed that regular viewers end up knowing less about what’s going on in the world than people who watch no news at all – while bigots on the Christian right who indoctrinate their children with anti-gay rhetoric is as funny as it is bleak. The gags are occasionally obvious, but they are important.

Fast-talking Camp packs an awful lot into this hour. The greed of the industrial-military complex and the dangerously destructive behaviour of the One Per Cent, the distractions that mean we don’t notice (the pampered pets routine is a particular stand-out) and the surveillance state that seems to have got lost amid all the chatter about whether Edward Snowden’s a nice chap or not.

If all this sounds a bit bleak for a comedy show, well Camp quite literally has something in his back pocket to satisfy those who want more traditional jokes: a notebook from which he reads gags which demonstrate he could be a sharp observational or one-liner comic, if the pull of the political wasn’t so irresistible to him. It’s a clever device, not just because it adds more gags to the hour and breaks up the invective, but because it proves to the audience what a good comic he is, so we trust him more to take us into realms that don’t initially seem like fertile ground for the funnies.

Another welcome inclusion is the tone of optimism at the end. Audiences don’t like being hectored about the state of the world with no respite. Mark Thomas knows this, and demonstrates that playful acts of subversion can make a difference. And Camp knows it too, describing himself as a ‘cynical optimist’ suggests that the internet is a powerful tool for change, communicating information that ‘They’ might prefer remained secret, and just a decade ago would never have got out. Although apathy is the speed hump on the highway to change, Camp believes it will happen.

His passion is infectious, even among a relatively sparse crowd, his message important and his jokes funny, incisive and important. So even if we do plunge into global apocalypse, we’ll have a laugh going down.

Review date: 24 Aug 2013
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett