Alun Cochrane
Wed 13 Oct 2010
The Glee Club, Cardiff
★★★★
words: Neil Collins
For a man decked head to toe in “double denim”, Yorkshire comic Alun Cochrane casts a surprisingly bold figure strolling onstage at the Glee Club.
He is even wearing colour-coordinated blue suede trainers to further offend the fashion gurus.
But in his typical, self-deprecating style, Cochrane extracts humour from trivial things in his everyday life, and therefore his choice of clothing gets relentlessly ridiculed for the first few minutes.
The 34-year-old studied his acting degree in the Welsh capital throughout the late 90s and he immediately makes himself at home amongst the Cardiff crowd with a couple of local jokes.
Firstly, he thanks the audience for coming out to see him; unlike the rest of Wales who are “probably watching the miners being released on TV” (ironically on Margaret’s Thatcher’s 85th birthday, no less).
And he later labels Wales a “fat nation”; a conclusion he has reached from late-night visits to Cardiff’s infamous takeway spot, ‘Chippy Lane’ during his student days.
But Cochrane’s delivery is always combined with a twinkle in his eye and a smile on his face. He is always an adept conversationalist with the crowd, and despite a few rabbit in the headlights expressions from the front row (or “death stares” as he calls them), Cochrane is nothing but warm and welcoming to his fans.
The new tour – entitled, Jokes. Life. And Jokes About Life – does exactly what it says on the tin…or in this case a Tupperware container.
Cochrane emerges from under the lights clutching a small, plastic box under his arm, which is wrapped in tin foil with the word ‘JOKES’ daubed across it in marker pen.
Not usually renowned as a gag man, much of Cochrane’s humour here is a lot more obvious than usual.
The premise of the show seems to stem from a night last Christmas when a heckler drunkenly challenged him to “tell us a joke”.
Uncharacteristically, the ever-affable Cochrane found himself stumped to come up with suitable one-liner in response. Taking the implied criticism to heart, he set about writing a whole box-full of quick-fire gags should such a situation arise again.
And it is from this box that Cochrane draws the majority of the show’s second half.
After plucking out and unravelling each ball of paper, Cochrane then puts the said joke into either the ‘Pocket of Potential’ or the ‘Pocket of Doom’ judging by the crowd’s reaction.
However, this part of the shows often seems a bit clunky and simply too scripted. There are even moments when Cochrane himself doesn’t always appear convinced, nor comfortable with this style of humour.
The one-liner may be a form of comedy made popular by the likes of Milton Jones and Stewart Francis, but Cochrane is far funnier when he relates experiences from his everyday life.
And his anecdotes nail it every single time – from banal observations of sat navs that won’t stick to car windscreens, to a woman absent-mindedly studying a banana whilst seemingly consulting a user manual.
But there is a deeper more pensive side to his humour which include references to his late gran’s Alzheimer’s condition and serious health scares hitting his loved ones – all of which he handles with a sensitive deftness of touch.
Evidently, Cochrane proves that even in dark moments humour can arise, and herein lies the crux of his theory that there is nothing funnier than life itself.
If only there were more like him in the world…