Tour show review

It’s got to be a win if a comic can get a laugh from a show title alone, so kudos to Milton Jones for the brilliantly named Ha!Milton, and all the accompanying promotional material parodying Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit musical.

That his stand-up tour has allegedly attracted a legal ‘cease and desist’ letter from producers of the original is one of the running jokes of the show. As is the fact the comedian is actually going to do a musical, based on the notional story of his forefather Hamilton Keynes trying to make his fortune in America back in the day. Indeed, there is even a song to two, although that is not the former Mock The Week regular’s forte.

That, as everyone in this room where it happens is patently aware, is inventive wordplay. Indeed, when one pun gets dangerously close to a groan, he reminds us: ‘You knew what you were in for!’

Such is the conspiracy of pun-based shows, of course. Everyone knows it’s nothing more than a game with the English language, and if the comic gets it right, as Jones so often does, it elicits a laugh of surprise. But even if you beat him to the punchlines, you can admire the handiwork or – especially in Jones’s case – enjoy the pure absurdity of the set-ups. 

He gets us implicated in the nonsense early doors  – were any 
encouragement needed – by getting us to make the ‘sound of space’, as heard in cheap 1960s sci-fi movies. And one convoluted pun makes him so happy he does a slo-mo victory dance, which the audience happily humours.

By the finale, loosely attempting to tie up the many disparate stands, Jones plays with the collusion itself, with a sluggish scene deliberately engineered to test our patience. ‘You can’t do this to us!’ I heard one man cry as the truth of how agonisingly slowly the climax pays off dawned on him. Of course he can, and like willing masochists, we lap up the audacity.

Occasionally, Jones laughs at the gall of his own set-ups, appearing on the edge of losing confidence in the artifice – another small acknowledgement of what some in the audience might be thinking – but generally, he delivers with a deluded authority the nonsense doesn’t warrant.

Support act Tom Houghton also helps set up the mood of forever being on the back foot, engaging in crowd work with an audience he playfully depicts as being far more hostile than they actually are, matched with self-deprecating quips about his own privilege. He’s the comic who spent five years living in the Tower Of London with his high-achieving father, Nick, the former Chief of the Defence Staff.

Houghton performs in front of a stage set like an abandoned house, dust sheets covering the props to come as Jones employs all he can in the name of silliness. That now includes projected images, a useful addition for a comic who always created cartoon-like pictures with his words, which can now be made manifest.

The show is loosely themed around sections, such as a volley of ‘awkward, isn’t it?’ observations that are far from relatable, given what a weird, if benign, outsider vibe Jones gives off. And sometimes he returns to a probably fictional uncle – nicely characterised – who lived by the motto that every bad situation can be transformed into a good one.

It’s minimal structure, but that’s all Jones needs to hang this litany of fresh, yet old-school, jokes upon. He is not throwing away his shot. 
 

• Milton Jones: Ha!milton is on tour until March. Milton ​Jones tour dates

Review date: 9 Sep 2024
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Bloomsbury Theatre