Review of the YouTube star's stand-up tour

The London Palladium is busy tonight, but the bar is doing slow business. Daniel Howell attracts a very young - predominantly female - audience, many of who don’t seem old enough to buy alcohol.

It is not your usual comedy crowd. At one point, when they all jump out of their chairs to eagerly burst bubbles blown from the stage, it feels – at least to this middle-aged old hack – more like a children’s birthday party. Even before the show, screams of giddy, Beatlemania-like excitement break out. As those in the stalls craned their necks skywards, gasping loudly, I genuinely thought Howell was going to make his showbiz entrance flying in on a wire. But no, they had just spotted the superstar that is Phil Lester in the circle.

If you have to ask ‘who?’, this is not the show for you.

Lester used to make online content with Howell, who has now broken out with this solo tour that is pure Gen Z: broad-brush, socially-astute, left-leaning politics with a hefty dose of mental health soul-searching, topped with positive affirmations in which he tells his audience to fight to overcome their insecurities and that their voice does matter.

This may be a comedy show, but laughter is not the response he most often gets. Instead, whoops and claps of appreciation ring out, partly because he plays the crowd so well, priming them with urgent inflections and pregnant pauses that the audience dutifully fill with applause.

He’s an engaging guy and has forged a close relationship with his fans online. They empathise with his despair at the state of the world, his desire to make things better, and fears that anything he does is inconsequential. All that feeds into his feelings of inadequacy that he’s upfront about discussing. His fans surely see themselves in him - even if, at 31, he’s more than a decade older than most of them – and root so vocally for him.

But objectively, without that shared history, that intimacy, that frisson of seeing your pal from the screen in the flesh, the show seems shallow.

Howell presses the right buttons, gets the right responses, and everyone loves him - but there’s little ingenuity in the comedy, little nuance or subtlety. Misdirection is key to stand-up, hiding truths in analogy, irony or abrupt revelations. However, that’s anathema to YouTuber influencers, who build their followings from being direct and selling their authenticity, or at least a version of it.

Howell starts in a suitably West End way, descending a staircase, ironically singing Everything’s Fine – as a video mashup of news events suggests an impending doomsday. Production values are excellent, and Howell’s a good entertainer, even if his subsequent stand-up can be a bit stagily performed and over-rehearsed.

The first half reviews some societal problems that fuel his fears that we are all doomed, such as the evils of social media. And yes, he does acknowledge the hypocrisy of that, given that he’s made his name online, or of going on a carbon-belching world tour to talk about climate change. He has a generally simplistic but crowd-pleasing approach. ‘Perhaps billionaires could pay more tax and then some people wouldn’t have to be homeless,’ he offers. A room presses ‘like’ in their heads.

Part two starts in a similar vein, as he sets himself up as a moral judge, flashing up various celebrities and getting the crowd to scream their approval or otherwise. And they do so full-throatedly, hollering for familiar bêtes noir from Joe Rogan to Elon Musk to JK Rowling to be shot into the sun. This pseudo game show lasts way too long, but no one seems to mind.

Then the emotional pivot. Howell takes a seat, a single spotlight illuminating him, as he talks earnestly and exclusively about the mental health struggles he’d previously been mentioning in parallel with all the big issues that exacerbate them. He shares a mood diary that rarely shows him happy, with flare-ups of self-loathing – and this after finally accepting his homosexuality, previously a big part of his adolescent unhappiness.

It’s candid and heartfelt – and undoubtedly reassures those members of his audience struggling with self-esteem and finding their place in this bin fire of a world that they are not alone. He’s doing good work.

However, if you’re a comedy fan who’s never previously encountered Howell, and wondering if the guy who’s filling out the London Palladium – twice – is a stand-up wunderkind you need to put on your radar… well, the answer’s no. But you can’t begrudge his success in giving a new generation exactly what they want, and probably need.

Review date: 29 Sep 2022
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: London Palladium