Standup doesn’t work on TV, they used to say. But now TV is more or less the only place you can see it, in ever-proliferating quantities. Courtesy of a new deal struck by Soho theatre and Amazon Prime, a hatful of new specials are being beamed to your living room in the new year. Meanwhile, Soho Theatre On Demand’s existing roster is available on Prime, including this 2017 offering, Pretending to Smoke With a Breadstick, by the man who is now host of ITV’s The Masked Singer: Joel Dommett.
Back then, he was an I’m a Celebrity survivor fresh from a tabloid sex scandal, an experience he rakes over with comic mortification here. It’s both a brave move to publicly own that experience and an irresistible one. This story of catfishing, blackmail and incautious “Skype sex” is an absolute gift to a comic, particularly one who plays the lovable doofus card as gleefully as Dommett. OK, so there’s some cognitive dissonance, three years on, watching the primetime star act out the hapless dork. But Dommett inhabits the persona with such infectious good cheer, it’s easy to be swept along.
It’s a ragbag of a show, loosely strung together by tales of Dommett’s chequered love life, but detouring via prop comedy, observational role plays, a showstopper about our host’s “laser dick” and Christmas carol singalongs. All are cheerfully stoopid, as Dommett revels in his own enfeebled response when a one-night stand goes rogue, or sets up a fruitful running joke about pranking his dozy grandad.
There are weaknesses: the lies v truth theme is clunkily integrated, and the opening sequence feels like padding. But Breadstick remains a fine comedy show for when you want to decommission your brain and watch a grownup turn playground humour into an art form. Dommett’s mic-drop moment is Exhibit A in this regard, a whole routine highly wrought in service of a yah-boo-sucks punchline. Then there’s the sex tape story, which finds the Masked Singer man unmasked in the cruellest manner imaginable. The joke, as usual, is on Dommett – but he makes it great fun for us to share in it.
