Michael McIntyre’s Big World Tour, it’s called – and the does-what-it-says-on-the-tin title is characteristic. McIntyre has been delivering exactly what people expect of him for well over a decade, and does so again tonight, with a show that deviates not one iota from the established formula. Fair enough: no one who likes what he does will be disappointed. But nor will they be surprised, as the king of primetime dispatches another 85 minutes of perky observations about family life, smartphones and bad traffic.
Increasingly it feels as if McIntyre’s most remarkable achievement is to keep finding new things to notice in domestic custom and everyday human (or should that be British?) behaviour. When he riffs here on taking a bath, or de-icing the windscreen, you think: surely he’s covered this before? But he retains the knack of making dull things effervesce. OK, the windscreen skit is more observations than jokes (he straw-polls the audience for favoured de-icing methods). But the hot-tub routine is a hit, drawing on McIntyre’s physical comedy skills as he “hover-paddles” above his scalding bath, testing the temperature with a delicate part of the male anatomy.
At such universally recognisable moments, you can see why – after long expressing no interest in breaking America – McIntyre recently took to the Broadway stage, en route to Asia, South Africa and beyond. Whether Hollywood beckons for this most parochial of English acts, who knows? At least the globetrotting supplies material tonight, as he jokes about swimming with sharks in Australia, burlesques the Belfast accent, and spins an unlikely story of malfunctioning electrics in a Norwegian hotel room.
The public realm rarely impinges; heaven forfend McIntyre express a divisive opinion. He mentions North Korea, only to cue a gag about his Asiatic looks. Elsewhere, with rare exceptions, he steers well clear of the culture wars’ contested territory. Instead – in an interminable central section – McIntyre jokes about driving. He starts drolly enough, miming the pelvic thrusts once required to adjust the driver’s seat position (“Often you’d overshag straight on to the steering wheel ...”), but the gears are soon grinding. The gags about how we use hazard warning lights to communicate (do we?) feel effortful. And by the time, 20 minutes later, he’s grumbling about letting other drivers in off slip roads, I felt like screaming for the next exit.
It’s a routine about traffic jams that feels like being stuck in a traffic jam. But it’s a general rule that McIntyre’s cramped focus on banal subjects can induce a certain claustrophobia. Yes, he has the skills to illuminate banality with surprising perspectives, funny walks, brilliant flashes of wit. But it remains prose not poetry. You can leave your imagination at the door. And – tonight at least – it’s all so shallow. There’s no sense – as in the work of, say, sometime observationalist Rhod Gilbert – that any of this is true or deeply felt. It’s all delivered in a tone of uniform tittering jollity, paring off what little distinction there is between the range of subjects under discussion.
None of which will matter to his many fans who will delight at another consignment of endearing observations and well calibrated self-mockery, delivered with real craftsmanship. But to the rest of us, it’s comedy that skips across the surface like McIntyre himself across the stage: slick, slight and making no significant impression.
• At Cardiff Arena, 11-16 April. Then touring.
