Review of the comedian's tour show in Glasgow

If Jen Brister’s show title is laced with the thickest of irony, then no one told the amorous couple in her front row last night – although it only exacerbated her pained vibe that she had to order them to shut up and keep their hands and mouths to themselves. This is patently not a show for overt displays of affection.

Brister’s devotion is on the darker side. She has a twisted obsession with Gwyneth Paltrow that’s an all-consuming loathing, and a love-hate relationship with her kids – twin boys, who were five and clingy during the lockdown  – that’s more instantly relatable.

She expresses her love by barefaced lying to them, reassuring them about the state of the world, safely knowing she can release the pressure valve of her own anxiety to rooms full of strangers at night.

Acting out at length the calamity of handing her sons walkie
-talkies on a camping trip in an ill-conceived ruse to buy her and her girlfriend some drinking time, Brister flicks between her personas in an instant. As she recreates the episode, the show of nurture is soon replaced by the pallid resignation of one whose brain is being turned to mush.

Like most comedians who carp about their children, Brister operates on the tacit basis that the audience knows she loves them and that she’s simply exaggerating her frustration for comic effect. Yet from the double-edged sword of having reached an international audience, she now finds herself being attacked online by highly strung, outraged American matriarchs for not counting her blessings sufficiently.

Although she reserves her most splenetic outbursts for her sons and these fools taking her declarations at face value, Brister also relies on a growling, gremlin-like inner monologue to express her darkest thoughts, which she further alternates with cold-eyed, emotionless ripostes of sarcasm to truly convey her contempt.

Ostensibly contrasting her real and socially acceptable selves, the cycle through these states has the extra benefit of emphasising her mental turmoil as a 47-year-old woman on the cusp of the menopause, completely ceasing to give a toss about offending anyone, wondering if she can drop the whole charade.

When she romanticises the clap for NHS workers during the pandemic, it’s with the thinnest veneer of sincerity from the outset. Her subsequent broadside against the Conservative government is a straightforward expression of her politics and met with resounding cheers.

She toys with the notion of reaching out, of trying to find common ground and understanding with right-wingers. Yet she instinctively knows that she prefers being judgmental. Which brings her back to Gwyneth, the Instagram fakery, the Snake Oil being shilled on that insane lifestyle website…

Following this seething, self-nourishing bile, Brister belatedly effects to claim the mantle of an edgelord, staking out the territory on a seemingly unlikely subject that everyone’s thinking about, yet no one else has had the guts to talk about on stage.

It’s a nice conceit and she sells it well, including a piqued argument with her Spanish mother, now almost obligatory in a Brister show.

But it comes a little late in the hour to not seem like an afterthought. And as the reason for it subsequently emerges, the sentimentality casting what’s come before in a fresh light, it doesn’t truly alter the perception that Brister is invariably at her most entertaining in explosive, misanthropic vent mode, her reflective moments the calm before the next compelling storm.

Review date: 7 Oct 2022
Reviewed by: Jay Richardson
Reviewed at: Glasgow Stand