Megan Nolan-
I ventured to London for the weekend to soak up some culture (ten bottles of wine and two episodes of Skins), where I caught this hit and miss but occasionally astonishing night of comedy at Notting Hill’s Tabernacle.
Nick Mohammed was first, a shrill and likably skittish comedian of the sketch show Sorry, I’ve Got No Head and last year’s BBC success Miranda. He was an excellent start to the evening, and a recurring visual joke about Chinese violinist Vanessa Mae was properly hilarious.
I freely admit that for the first few minutes of his set I thought middle act Jonny Sweet was an irritating buffoon. However, it quickly became apparent that, dare I say it, I was the irritating buffoon, because he was performing one of the most imaginative and inspiring stand up sets I’ve ever seen.
His persona is that of a childishly excitable man, with the laboured, earnest hipness of Call-me-Dave Cameron- perhaps no coincidence, as Sweet also played the man himself in C4 docu-drama When Boris Met Dave.
Much of the reward here was found in his attempts to convince the audience that an informative lecture about the HMS Nottingham is not a bad idea for a stand up show. My inexplicable personal highlight was him trying to convince the audience he was a fun guy by showing a thirty second video of himself in a form-fitting sailor suit doing a deadpan sassy dance. Is there anything more pleasing to watch than a deadpan sassy dance? Probably, probably, but I don’t want to know about it.
Sweet’s set was a wonderful surprise; it was easily worth the fifteen quid by itself. Engaging, endearing, and innovative, the only flaw was that it cast what followed in such a bad light.
Adam Buxton. Ah, Adam Buxton. First, I should point out that I think he is clearly a clever, hardworking and funny man. To be fair, his initial difficulties stemmed from technological mishap. This went on for more than five minutes, and for the whole episode, Buxton stood there like a shy child, making occasional awkward jokes but essentially failing utterly to engage with the audience in a basic way. The unwillingness to even attempt to create performance seemed to me quite bizarre and unprofessional.
That failing aside, the remainder of the show relied heavily on the screening of his hugely popular videos, such as “Songs of Praise (With subtitles)”. I’m a fan of his videos, but I’m not sure I see the validity in screening them in this context, as most people in the room had surely seen them.
He also performed two songs, and I was glad to see something out of his comfort zone, but neither particularly worked for me. There seemed in both to be one good idea with a lot of not very well thought out padding.
I regret seeing Buxton on a night which he visibly knew was not his finest, and I feel like a curmudgeon for picking on it, but Jonny Sweet was almost embarrassingly obviously the best thing about the evening.
3/5
