Frank Skinner is 62, and it’s remarkable he can even make it on stage, he says: “It’s like when you see a wasp in November.” As for constructing a show, addressing a theme, coming to a point – well, forget it. The kids can do that. Skinner’s new standup set – in situ for a month – is almost aggressively irrelevant and digressive. It amounts to nothing more than an old bloke moseying around the stage until his time is up, telling disconnected jokes about whatever happens to amuse him. As such, it’s very funny indeed.
Skinner is the archetypal comic with “funny bones”. You can believe he’s really amused by life, by himself – and by his audience. His stillnesses are forever pregnant with the next joke. The mot juste seldom eludes him, although there’s never any heavy lifting. “Well, I was taken aback,” he understates, after Richard Madeley announces to him at a party that he doesn’t bother with underpants. The mildness of Skinner’s surprise becomes a delightful part of the joke.
That story arrives in a short routine about celebrity gossip – the genesis, perhaps, of the tour, titled Showbiz, he plans for later this year. But the subject is no more prominent than, say, ageing or recent fatherhood. Or Star Wars: there’s a gag about shrivelled Jedi master Yoda that isn’t just apropos of nothing, but hasn’t been apropos of anything for 20 years. In Skinner’s hands, the arbitrariness is part of its charm.
The richest routine, at least for longtime fans of this ex-king of lad comedy, is the one about his fading libido. (“Free at last!”) It leads to a gag uniting those improbable bedfellows, Nicole Scherzinger and “Derbyshire neck”. And to a droll joke about the unterrifying nature of “the curse of Strictly.” But the non sequitur skits are often just as irresistible, such as the beautifully deadpanned one imagining what movies would be like if characters ever had to repeat themselves for clarity. The show meanders, takes its time, goes nowhere fast – and, tonight at least, reaps big laughs.
• At Leicester Square theatre, London, until 4 July. At Assembly George Square, Edinburgh, from 31 July until 18 August.
