Comedy Review: Daniel Kitson, 66a Church Road: A Lament, Made of Memories and Kept in Suitcases

I've always thought that a good way of judging the quality of a show is how much of its spirit accompanies you home on the Tube, swimming lazily around in your head juices and sticking with you for a while after you slam shut the front door at home.

When I saw The Woman in Black for the first time (aged 12 or so), I spent a night have recurrent fear-aneurisms about vengeful spirit-bitches from the black beyond. When I saw Springsteen on his Magic tour (in a stadium, on my own. Go me), I air-guitared my way home like I was sprung from cages on Highway 9. A good show leaves ghosts of thoughts that take time to fade, like flashbulb motes flaring across your eyes.

Which brings me somewhat unceremoniously to Daniel Kitson, who has been quietly winning crowds over for years with a mix of stand-up routines and so-called story shows, which mix humour with narrative structure, recounting events from Kitson's life and stirring in immaculately worded observations on the strange irregularities of mundane life.

You might have also seen him pop up briefly on Peter Kay's Phoenix Nights series, although he later dismissed the show as "lazy and racist" (on the Phoenix Nights DVD commentary, Kay refers to Kitson only as "the bastard").

It's clear that Kitson shines brightest when telling his own tales, and 66a Church Road is a fine example. In recounting his love affair with a relatively unassuming piece of rented accommodation and his subsequent, years-long quest to purchase it from a colossal clusterfuck of a landlord, Kitson actually delivers a whole lot more.

Possibly the closest touchstone to Kitson's style is Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure, but while Gorman relied on a preposterously dramatic turn of events to keep audiences rapt, Kitson shows a true flair for performance by achieving precisely the same result with considerably less pliable material.

Whether conveying the sheer joy of his favourite full English breakfast ("Nailed it! Nailed it! Nailed it!" he cries, gesticulating wildly at an imaginary plate of sausages and beans) or vividly recreating the highs and lows of his fraught flat hunt, Kitson has the audience alternating between fits of laughter and ravenous silence for a full hour and a half.

The show is broken up by musical interludes (sounded like Iron & Wine to me) over which Kitson's pre-recorded voice plays, while the man himself illustrates the scene with adorably twee home-made models, appropriately stashed away in suitcases strewn about the stage.

But what made the show great, what had me still digesting the spirit of it on the way home, was Kitson's poignant vision of home as a concept, and what that concept ought to be. It's the show's central theme, and throughout, Kitson poetically expands on the idea that home is a repository of memory and the keystone with which we reassure ourselves that those memories won't be lost, because they've seeped into the walls and floors and before we know it they're galleried all around us.

Whether we find home in a building or in the arms of a loved one, the protection of memory - the instrument we use to measure and define the meaning of our lives - is an enduring and endlessly romantic theme. That's the warm spirit of 66a Church Road, and that's what I was thinking about on the Tube home.

Comedy review: Tim Key's The Slutcracker live at the Soho Theatre, February 19th 2010

Reviewing a comedy gig seems like a particularly futile exercise. It is, of course, impossible to predict whether you'll find something funny without hearing the jokes, and a review can't tell you any of the jokes without spoiling them for you. If indeed you would have found them funny in the first place. All in all, it's like trying to describe a BMW driver without once using the phrase "self-important, overcompensating bumsniffer". Almost impossible, I'm sure you'll agree. However, occasionally indulging in futile exercises is the only way to strengthen your Quixotic Obstinatrix muscle group*, so on with the show!

Now I don't like to make a habit of issuing brash proclamations. They always come back to haunt you like the ghost of that Papa Roach album you once thought would change the world. What I will say is that Tim Key is the future of comedy.

One of the finest comedians to emerge from the group of innovative, Edinburgh-approved performers that have been trickling into the mainstream of late, you may recognise Tim Key from his poetry recitals dotted throughout Charlie Brooker's Newswipe or as the questioneer from the recently-aired comedy quiz show We Need Answers.

But it's clear that The Slutcracker is Key's baby. And what a charming, delightfully malformed baby it is. Ditching traditional set-up/punchline structure in favour of poems (read and analysed almost simultaneously), supported by video clips, music and childishly anarchic physical comedy. It sounds a bit fiddly, but such is Key's control that the show slides effortlessly from poetry to short films to shambling acrobatics in the grand old tradition of larking about.

To quote from Key's poems would be to take them out of their proper context and butcher them most cruelly and inhumanely, so I won't. But the fact that he can fix an audience with that dead-eyed gaze (see image above) and give a description of bollocks being bitten off and elicit laughs rather than screams is a testament to his skill. The secret is in the flightiness of his delivery; mock-seriousness swiftly gives way to tension-relieving affability, often through Key's idle chit-chat with sound man Fletch. It's a mix of surreal inscrutability and rosy-cheeked English chumminess that never errs too far on the side of one or other.

Given the shambolic nature of the show, it's a minor miracle that by the time it ends with a finale that takes audience interaction to a new level (I won't spoil it, but let's just say he almost broke my girlfriend's goddamned wrist), it all seems so complete. Apparently plucking coherence out of chaos is another grand gift that Tim Key can add to the long list.

Tim Key is currently performing The Slutcracker at the Arts Theatre in the West End. This extra run lasts until 13th March.

* The most important of the made-up muscle groups.

Louis CK live review

My review of Louis CK's live set at the Bloomsbury theatre about a month ago has just gone live at Londoners. Make your soul fat with vicariously-experienced amusement by clicking here.

It takes a very funny man or woman to make me slither from my crusty bedsheets and stalk the streets like some mad squid. It turns out that Louis CK is that man or woman.