The sense of event is palpable at Leicester Square theatre before this rare UK gig for the celebrated US standup Maria Bamford. Star of her own Netflix series Lady Dynamite, and trailing “world’s funniest” superlatives from her fellow comics, Bamford is making her London debut, surprisingly – a dozen years after her last Edinburgh fringe run. And she doesn’t disappoint: this is an hour of extreme idiosyncrasy, from a comic – and, one suspects, a human being – quite incapable of looking at the world in the same way as anyone else.
Whether that’s an enviable quality is moot, given that – as Bamford makes clear on stage and in Lady Dynamite – it can’t be disentangled from her experience of anxiety and bipolar disorder. But there’s no doubt she fashions her sensibility into distinctive comedy, including a section tonight recounting her recent stint in a psychiatric facility. Another patient’s visitor, recognising a celebrity exposed, reassures Bamford she won’t tell a soul; Bamford, light years past caring, gives the visitor permission to tell whoever the hell she pleases.
Something of that spirit pervades the show: a certain liberation; imperviousness to propriety; an anthropological curiosity at the things other grownups take seriously. And she retains the demeanour of someone who finds everyday living a challenge. Less so than in the past, she tells us; now married for three years, she’s carefully husbanding a new contentment. So there’ll be less material than usual, she announces, on mental health. But she still makes a compelling cartoon of her brittleness. Switching between timorous squeaks and sudden barks, she’s all gawky physicality, and – as she demonstrates – a trembling hand. Every other joke suggests a worldview that “quirky” doesn’t begin to cover.
“Weakness is the brand!” she jokes in an opening section sending up the cult of high achievement. T-shirts with empowering slogans get it in the crew-neck, and the sarcasm is molasses-thick when Bamford describes a comment she’s just made as “my favourite quote from Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In”. Will to power isn’t her thing; more like will to work stuff out. Other couples might do sexual role play, but when Bamford tries it, the scenarios (gentrification; the living wage) are oddly detumescent. Other people go swing dancing, say, or horse riding – and Bamford would like to go too, if only she could work out why.
If it’s her curse to sense the inherent futility of everything, she makes a comic blessing of it here, whether confessing her confusion, or trying to conceal it a bit too strenuously behind a mask of high-functioning normality. (“You guys know what I’m talking about, right?!?”) The finest example of that is the last, as Bamford performs an artless closing “song” about the pitched battle she and her husband stage between marital love and mutual irritation. Elsewhere, there’s a fine extended routine about an argument between atheist Maria and her devout mum – featuring three case studies – as to who is the better Christian.
There’s not really a winner in that debate, nor in Bamford’s struggle to make sense of living and keep the “scream-crying” at bay. Even when she’s succeeding at comedy, it’s by telling stories that are shot through with crippling self-doubt. But the audience wins, because we get to see a comic craftswoman making us laugh in the most unexpected, hard-won and emotionally authentic ways.
- At Leicester Square theatre, London, until 23 March. Box office: 020-7734 2222.
