After a series of shows teasing at hot-button issues (gender, white identity, leftwing politics), Fin Taylor changed tack last year with So My Wife … It drew on his interest in vintage, ’er-indoors comedy, and a time when no one expected anything more from comedians than a battery of (ideology-free) jokes.
What we get, in a show now on YouTube, feels a little more politically engaged than that. But not politically committed – you are left with no sense of what Taylor really thinks, nor any sustained inquiry of the type that made his earlier shows rewarding.
Perhaps if the set were much funnier, its superficiality and ideological hedging would be easier to love. I’m not sure jokes and values can be so easily disentangled, mind you – certainly not in a show that touches on gender, environmentalism and the rest. In Taylor’s quips about how annoying Greta Thunberg is, or how he might “identify as a nine-year-old” to win junior football matches, is it the worldview that is deflating – or just the hoary quality of the gags?
It’s the opening stages that deliver on Taylor’s latter-day Bernard Manning premise, as he talks about his new wife and their efforts to conceive a child. The attritional sex that requires, and a later routine about breast pumps, find Taylor milking a productive duct of carnal comedy, even if the ironic chauvinism (“my wife’s a hog” etc) feels gratuitous. The shock-jockery sometimes carries a frisson (baiting older people for monopolising vaccines, for example) but is often built on flimsy foundations, as when he mocks progressives for non-interference when Islam and homosexuality collide. Addressing subjects like that, a fondness for old-school, mother-in-law comedy will only take you so far.
