Sometimes, comedy is no laughing matter
Chris Kent has gone 'offline'
Comedian Chris Kent is gone offline. He’s done with smart phones. His Damascus moment came when he received his Google notice. You know the ones: “You’ve spent two hours more on your smart phone this week than last”. Shock…horror.
Then the guilt sets in. Except in Chris’s case, he was spending 10 hours plus per day on his smart phone. “Addicted?” asks Chris. “Noooo waaaay, like” says he in that Cork accent that whines when self-accusation sets in. “I just like to scroll…like”, explains the comic who loves to finish his sentences with “like” and Annie and Dave, my next-seat neighbours, just love him.
Chris likes to work his audience. He finds a couple that aren’t married but thinking about it…a couple that’s engaged with no date set…and gold dust from a girl called Jess who turns out to be a wedding singer, and she’s got her mother in tow. Immediately Chris connects all the couples and gags about getting married – or not – begin to flow.
There’s an engineer or two. One works in a pharma company and Chris is there with the perfect summary of a cushy number. He should know…he was an electrician. Then there’s Zoe from Oz. “Sooo,” says Chris as he nuances his inflection upwards in a soothing let-me-be-your-confidante-way “what do you do?...I’m a horse midwife and I bring the stallion to the mare for a stand”…says she and the crowd love it as much as the mare does. “Could you be more specific?” asks Zoe’s new bestie but…no…that was all Chris was getting.
The law of audience interaction is Pandora’s because you don’t always get what you expect when you open that box. At one stage in the proceedings, the show begins to go pear-shaped. One member of the audience is laughing continuously throughout. At everything – funny or otherwise. “Are you familiar with the term punchline?” asks the clearly annoyed comic. Others in the audience, who had paid €30 for their seat, were less forgiving and begin to join forces on the unfortunate woman who couldn’t stop laughing. Some audience comments were crude and unnecessary. To Chris’s credit, he manages the incident well and gets his gig back on track. But it’s on everyone’s lips as we exit the theatre. Sometimes, comedy is no laughing matter.
This comic likes dark spaces. Graveyards and such. The stories are all linked together on Chris’s theme of going offline and the law of unintended consequences that paddle along in your direction. Like being sent to A& E when he’s under pressure to make a gig, or the nursing home where the residents are described as being in God’s waiting room but are never foolish enough to waste precious time scrolling.
Some of the stories don’t really hang together on his “offline” washing line of yarns. Like the experiment of using schoolkids who became their own school traffic wardens back in the eighties – how daft was that? Chris thought it might have been as recent as the noughties – or even later. However, like much of the storytelling, I found it unlikely. This comic sold out the Theatre Royal this year and last. He’s clever, witty, and likeable but the narrative around giving up a smart phone for a couple of months has really got limited appeal. Chris ties up his narrative with a neat irony but I think I had got the message about too much time spent on scrolling after five minutes.
Perhaps it’s time to go back online again?
