Glenn Moore has a device he’s deploying in his new show, to maintain a balance between hilarity and underwhelm. He has two notebooks, one placed on each side of the stage. If a joke goes badly, he’ll go to the book containing his best ever material, and win the audience round with one of those classic gags. And if tonight’s crowd starts loving his show too much, he’ll read from the other book, containing material he’s ashamed of.
Slim chance, you might think, of Moore’s audience not finding him funny: this is one of the best joke writers in the business. And Please Sir, Glenn I Have Some Moore? is another compendium of crackers from the 36-year-old. They are strung around the episodic tale of a drive through Death Valley he took, years ago, with his two cousins. They take a wrong turn, get lost, and acrimony ensues, in a story designed to demonstrate our host’s low self-esteem and lack of assertiveness.
All of which is fine, as far as it goes. But Moore is not a comedian gifted with conviviality, nor at making us believe a word he says. The material may be self-deprecating, but the delivery remains officious. It’s made repeatedly clear that Moore prioritises the gag over the building of a good-faith rapport with his audience – and consequently the Death Valley story, and indeed the two-books device, are hard to take at face value. (Moore’s decisions to read from one or the other book, supposedly based on audience reaction, feel entirely arbitrary.)
Does any of that matter? We come to comedy shows to laugh, and Moore doesn’t stint on that front. Puns, visual puns, idioms upended, arresting observations – the Croydon man is a grandmaster of them all, from his gag hating on the French language (“Every day they change the meaning of soup du jour”) to his belter on Mick Jagger’s erotic credo. Maybe he doesn’t have the onstage demeanour to sell them as genially as he might, but the quality, quantity and variety of the jokes here can’t be taken for granted.
• At Soho theatre, London, 8-13 September, then touring
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