Peter Kay has his garlic bread gag, Micky Flanagan has his Out Out riff. Both routines are the comedy equivalent of hit songs that fans hope to hear when they buy a ticket. Ex-medic Adam Kay has his must-tell tale too. The degloving story, about an unfortunate patient who turned up in A&E having ripped of the skin off his genitalia sliding down a lamp post.
Kay bowed to the demands of his public halfway through his Soho Theatre set this weekend. Though he also has another routine that tops it. It certainly had a similar effect on the men in the audience. His intimate account of having a kidney stone and the extreme lengths he went to to expel it had every male member wincing in unison. Now that's what I call painfully funny.
What makes the second story even more vivid is that happened to Kay. Most of his absorbing show revolves around workplace anecdotes while he was a junior doctor. Some harrowing, some humorous. In the end it all proved too much for him and he quit after six years of medical school and seven on the wards.
Since then his gigs and books have been a huge success. They've even produced a publishing sub-genre by others juggling stethoscopes and stand-up. Matt Hutchinson has written about being a black NHS doctor, Are You Really The Doctor? Anaesthetist Ed Patrick wrote Catch Your Breath. Psychiatrist Benji Waterhouse wrote You Don’t Have to Be Mad to Work Here.
Onstage there are fewer smutty pop parodies than in past Kay outings. Instead, when he plays his keyboard perched on top of two giant pill bottles, there is a clear love of language. His jaunty tune listing a multitude of medications has strong echoes of the recently departed Tom Lehrer's periodic table song The Elements.
Alongside the deadpan bedpan humour is Kay's anger about the way staff are treated by the NHS. It's not just about pay, it is about systemic pressure. Suicide levels are shockingly high (one doctor every three weeks), which is why, he explains, he included one in the TV version of his book This Is Going To Hurt, starring Ben Wishaw.
He is not, however, averse to tempering a stark statistic with a cheap punchline. In his seven years in hospitals he was only able to spend Christmas Day with his family once: "so it wasn't not all bad," he grins.
Towards the end he gets more personal. Not about kidney stones again, but about becoming a father, from the obligatory comic tale of sperm donation to a frantic transatlantic dash to Washington to witness the birth. The real tearjerker though for Kay is his closing appeal for more support for his former profession. A heartfelt plea in a show that is both rip-roaringly comic and seriously passionate.
Touring. Tickets and information here: https://www.adamkay.co.uk/
