Radio review by Steve Bennett

Most Radio 4 comedies come from performers who’ve bided their time on the circuit and won plaudits at Edinburgh. 

But Simon Rich isn’t from that world. Instead he’s more normally described as a ‘humourist’ – a slightly more literary noun that can conceal a variety of sins. 

The son of  notorious former New York Times theatre critic Frank Rich, now one of the executive producers of Veep, Simon has an impeccable pedigree: one of youngest writers on Saturday Night Live, which he joined after leaving Harvard, a Pixar staffer and a regular contributor to the New Yorker. New Yorker. His books win oodles of praise, with the Guardian calling him ‘the wittiest humourist of his generation’.

But The World Of Simon Rich is his first Radio 4 venture. In production, it sounds rather like a lot of middling radio comedies, and the opening couple of skits – such as the  surgeon with a penchant for April fool’s jokes –  are amusing without standing out.

However, it’s in the longer fictions in which the show finds its own place and pace, with an unhurried storytelling that sets up delightful images. The absurdity starts with a whimsical Alice In Wonderland-style tale about a nine-year-old girl and her adventures with a waistcoated goat. There’s the inventive, staccato inner monologue of a condom inside a teenager's wallet, a rather charming story it turns out, or the conversation between God and his unlikely messenger on Earth, both of which throw reality into a new perspective.

The shorter sketches vary the pace, and tend to be a little more conventional in their structure, even if the premise is absurd. But often the gags transcend the format: Missed Connections, but for dogs, being the funniest.

Rich introduces the skits, which are performed with a top-notch cast, including the versatile comics Peter Serafinowicz, Cariad Lloyd, Jamie Demetriou and Joseph Morpurgo – and the very distinctive Tim Key, whose dry tones are well-matched to Rich’s alternate realities, especially playing that gentle prophylactic.

• The World of Simon Rich is on Radio 4 at 11pm tonight.

Review date: 2 Jun 2016
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett