LIMMY | COMEDY REVIEW
Glee Club, Cardiff Bay, Mon 12 June
Limmy’s career up to this point, a sold-out UK tour of standup comedy venues, is notable for how little mind it’s paid to the traditional standup route. In fact, he’s not really a standup comedian at all: this show comes in two parts, a reading from his book of short stories That’s Your Lot and a Q&A session with the Glee Club audience. Except when he goes off-piste into a routine – I’m calling it that; it may have been improvised – about his more lurid material, here and on social media, coming back to embarrass his young son in the school playground. It’s physical, vulgar and great, and demonstrates his natural, unlearned talent in the medium.
Before this, Limmy (for the uninitiated: Brian Limond, a Glaswegian in his early 40s who first got popular on the Scottish internet a decade or so back with a series of self-hosted, self-recorded sketches, before word spread and the BBC commissioned three series) sits down in a large, private members’ club type chair and makes himself and us at home. Ostensibly here to plug That’s Your Lot, he voices concern that casual fans might just want to hear him run through his most popular characters’ catchphrases, so we begin with 10 minutes of requests to that end. It’s rescued from pointlessness by his interactions with the crowd, but the book-reading is when matters begin in earnest.
The three stories Limmy reads here have something of the shaggy dog about them, their endings wilfully inconclusive and dampened: these are not tales of redemption or moral lessons, any more than you’d expect if you’ve seen Limmy’s Show on TV. You could reasonably say that Taxi Patter, set in a London cab with a leering driver, is a satire of everyday sexism, male social codes and heteronormativity, if you were that way inclined, but that’s not why it’s funny per se. Pavement has something of the Roald Dahl about its cartoonish horror, but the only takeaway is that one shouldn’t tamper with wet concrete.
Following a “pish break”, the second half of the show is dedicated to fielding questions from the audience. This is a healthy if haphazard mixture of the generic (“who’s the most famous person you’ve ever met?” – Matt Lucas, apparently, who is also deemed more famous than Alex Salmond), the earnest fanboying/girling (a section about his rejected sitcom pitches, which he has talked about in interviews a few times), the references to his material (being on a ‘permo’, or permanent acid trip – a former pal of Limmy’s apparently suffers from this while working in the upper echelons of trade unionism) and cosy topics of his like porn and computer games (neither are tackled as laddishly as you might fear, although extensive discussion of something called Overwatch has made me no less likely to play it).
Clearly on some level a showcase for his quick wit and improvisational abilities, Limmy manages to extract a laugh from pretty much every question, even the uninspiring ones. As close to an organic sensation as you can get in British comedy at the moment, despite – perhaps because of – having little interest in its conventions.
words NOEL GARDNER