Review of the live event to launch his book

It’s probably a good job that tickets for Adrian Bliss’s live show to launch his book The Greatest Nobodies of History came with a free copy, as his sketches acting out chapters did little to sell the concept.

While history books are dominated by significant figures, the hugely successful internet comedian says he wants to highlight the role of ‘supporting cast members’, which he does from an unusual point of view.

So for chapter one, re-enacted here, we learn about Diogenes of Sinope, an ancient Greek philosopher who shunned possessions and traditional ideas about human decency, living in a clay wine jar – or pithos – and shitting, spitting, farting and masturbating in public. Now considered one of the founders of cynicism as a school of philosophy, he’s a fascinating outsider, for sure. 

Bliss approaches his subject by suggesting some centuries-old correspondence has recently come to light, including letters from a concerned Athenian citizen complaining about this unsavoury presence in his neighbourhood and the official responses he received.

The problem is this device offers nothing but flim-flam, with many needless words devoted to how this fictional citizen is planning a 30th birthday party to impress his acquaintances, how he deserves respect and how he could definitely get a girlfriend if he wanted to. 

Very little is this funny, and it just dilutes the fascinating story of Diogenes. There’s a decent gag in the responses about the civil servants taking part in ‘No Work November’ and another about the modern scourge of the vacuous ‘how are we doing?’ customer service surveys, but so much feels like padding.

It’s a similar situation when Bliss takes on The Plague, which he personifies, with the aid of co-star Beth Rylance, as the glamorous Yersinia Pestis, the scientific name for the bacterium that causes it. The premise for this scene is that she is having a sit-down interview with Dennis Peyps, a descendent of Samuel who did so much to chronicle the 17th-century outbreak.

This section is written in the guise of an effusive magazine profile, full of inconsequential detail about the swanky private members’ club where they are supposedly meeting, and even takes time to describe them ordering a coffee and mentioning how ‘Americano’ is not a beverage Italians would recognise. Again, it all seems pointless. What could be a way to smuggle historical facts into a scene negated by the vacuity and longwindedness of the situation.

This book launch is set up as being introduced by ‘The Bookworm’ as Bliss himself is stuck in traffic… but no prizes for guessing who’s really inside the fancy-dress outfit. He cracks some tortuous puns that are greeted by agonisingly stony silence from an audience who are presumably fans of his online work. Later, he deconstructs the pretence with questions falling out of sync with the prerecorded answers, in a scene that’s funny but very heavily indebted to The Two Ronnies.

Bliss seems charming, enthusiastic and ego-free – qualities that have helped him on the socials – but on the evidence of tonight he struggles to convert his lay interest in the past into a book, with The Greatest Nobodies Of History not funny enough for comedy, too tangential to be informative.

We end the evening with a lightweight Q&A conducted by Rylance, also a sometime co-star of his online videos, in which Bliss credits a historian collaborator for doing the heavy lifting when it came to research (and unsuccessfully using ChatGPT to ask for ideas).

And he talked about the difficulty in writing long-form as opposed to 60-second sketches, a strain which seems very apparent in the scenes we saw tonight, which seem to prove that having a massive internet following does not a polymath make.

•  The Greatest Nobodies of History: Minor Characters from Major Moments, by Adrian Bliss is published by Century on Friday. It is available from Amazon priced £14.59  – or from uk.bookshop.org, below, which supports independent bookstores.

Review date: 28 Aug 2024
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Union Chapel