Her touring show is called The Optimist, but fans can rest assured: it reflects no brightening of Jen Brister’s crabby disposition. Its only optimistic idea is that anyone might take that title on trust. Brister’s stock in trade is scorn and rage at the state of her life and the world, delivered with meticulous technical control. Nothing in comedy is more expertly calibrated than the way the 47-year-old pivots from passages of cool restraint, amusingly pregnant with the next outburst, to the outbursts themselves, as her fury erupts at her twin boys, or some doltish criticism of her standup, or the idiocy of her fellow citizens.
Is there an argument that Brister is too good a comic now to be quite so reliant on that essentially two-dimensional persona? I think there is. Tonight’s material on that softest of targets, Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop website, feels like something Brister has conjured up just to give her something to be publicly splenetic about – and very amusingly too. Elsewhere, we travel back to Covid quarantine, where our host is failing to home-school two free-spirited 5-year-olds. A set-piece about toy walkie-talkies tests our patience to the limit in the service of a gag about the patience-testing frustrations of lockdown parenthood.
That routine, as many do tonight (the one about sourdough obsession in her native Brighton; the one about vulva deodorant) climaxes with Brister clawing at her own face in exasperation. But she knows how to modulate the acrimony, as with a jaundiced routine about clapping for the NHS that swaps in withering sarcasm where breast-beating rage might have served. There’s some fine joke writing amid the cynicism too, like the punchline about getting sunburnt in Dundee, or the one about a menopausal facial hair you could “cut cheese with”.
That gag comes in a closing section, about life in your 40s, that’s more upbeat – at least until a late revelation about Brister’s personal life. I welcomed the change in tone. No one does furious better than Brister, but she is too good to be confined by it.
