Lee Evans holds the record for the biggest comedy gig ever performed - and you can see why. He has the common touch in spades: his material is so middle-of-the-road, you half expect someone in a fluorescent jerkin to paint a white line along it. He has clowning skills cavemen probably found funny, and a heart big enough to fill Nottingham Arena - or at least those parts not filled already with glitter and punters in shock at his piano finale about the impending apocalypse.
The climax aside, Evans' subjects are usually pedestrian. His second half is given over to "blokes do this, women do that" comedy, where men can't iron and wives obsess about their weight. But traditional doesn't equal chauvinist; the jokes are always, finally, on Evans himself. And he has the charm to make the regressive shtick funny. His wife's exfoliating routine looks like a trip to the garage, while a dishwasher opened mid-cycle yields an anthropomorphic drama all of its own: "What the fuck! Get out of it, we're havin' a shower!"
Every gag, of course, is elevated by Evans' physicality and gusto. Several routines surrender their punchline to his gurning, undulant body, like the one about men greeting one another with little boxing punches (he proposes the triple jump instead), or the one in which he tries signalling to passing women that he is not an attacker. Elsewhere, when he is dismayed or angry, it is as if the feelings he is too meek to express must escape via uncontrollable contortions of his feeble frame. I regret the Daily Mail worldview, but don't doubt that Evans is one of the great clowns of the age.
