You can understand why Jenny Eclair might focus her standup on the experience of turning 60. Comedy stages are not exactly teeming with sexagenarian women; she has the territory pretty much to herself. And it’s a fertile comic landscape, as this touring show about Nordic walking poles, bowel screening and “knitting jerseys for the robo-hoover” makes abundantly clear. But one might also regret the show’s heavy reliance on familiar ageing tropes, because it undercuts Eclair’s stated refusal to be defined by turning 60, and because it plays to the gallery of her assumed crowd. “How many Breton tops have we got?” she opens by asking, and all that follows is pitched squarely at an audience very like Eclair herself.
Happily, she appears undiminished by entry into her seventh decade, notwithstanding repeated references to bodily and mental decay. Eclair is on ebullient form here, overbrimming with gossip from 60’s frontline, where you look in the mirror and see Angela Merkel; where sex feels as dutiful as making your own pastry. Any associations between later-life and decorum are swiftly dispelled: one routine begins: “Do you remember all the wanking we used to have to do?”, and the show is well lubricated with jokes about the dryness of the sixtysomething vagina.
They’re easy hits, these gags about collapsing bodies and the sex lives of the no-longer-young, and tend to reinforce rather than up-end cliches. And, in this 90-minute outing, Eclair does lay on thick her supposed identity as a decrepit old biddy. Or Grumpy Old Woman – there’s a bit of that shtick, too. Both are contradicted by the ample evidence of a sharp and joyous comic mind, as with her lovely story of a distracted experience on a zip-wire in Wales, or her transposition on to late middle-age of a glamorous seduction technique she sees on TV.
Then there’s the more intimate material about her nonagenarian parents, which offsets the broad old-age comedy with something more from-the-heart. Finally, Eclair embraces 60 as “one of life’s sweet spots”, and in this show – in spirit, if not always in her material – she’s a great advert for it.
Jenny Eclair: Sixty! (FFS) is now touring.
