Not for the first time, Lee Evans ends with a song: a ballad this time, about an entertainer who sacrifices his personal life to make others laugh. Is it autobiographical? Well, it certainly offers a more intriguing glimpse of the real Evans than the two hours of comedy that precede it. There's plenty to enjoy in this new show, Roadrunner, from the grandaddy of arena standup. For all his fabulous expressiveness, though, there's something more mechanical than usual about Evans's scrupulously demotic shtick. He strains so hard to be everyman, he forgets to be himself.
He remains, of course, a master of large-scale comedy, to the extent that it's hard to imagine him playing a small room. His cartoonish physicality is endlessly amusing, as in his dumbshow of racing car wheels bidding for freedom after a crash, and his demonstration of the different types of sneeze encountered in a doctor's waiting room. His voice is equally gymnastic: he finds infinite ways to stretch and stress the word "fuck" in impotent dismay. This is all dispatched at gutbusting pace, building towards a bulletproof closing tale of the laxative he took before a recent colonoscopy, which turned his backside into "a vuvu-fucking-zela".
But as he progresses from one commonplace subject to the next, Evans's show rings a little inauthentic. On a set rescued from a Cannon and Ball Christmas special, he presents himself less as an individual, more as an agglomeration of populist cliches. Every holiday must be to Tenerife; every meal is sausage, beans and chips. As for "the twat in the office who thinks he's Tiger Woods", well, how can Evans, who can't have worked in an office for years, be agitated about that? He's a great entertainer. But he'd be greater still if his comedy was as from-the-heart as that closing song.
