What do you want your comedy to deliver? Laughs, in the first instance – and sometime Live at the Apollo man Nathan Caton can be relied upon to deliver them. He’s got a winning laid-back manner and a handful of solidly constructed set-pieces to which few could take exception. But I’d welcome a little more creative ambition. Caton’s topics, personality and opinions are all unexceptional. I’m not trying to offend anyone, he repeatedly assures us – to which the only response is: more’s the pity.
That’s not to say comedy has to be outspoken, just that Caton is too attached to the middle of the road. Never more so than when, midway through the show, he talks politics. Others may get less frustrated than I do by his “they’re all as bad as each other” perspective, or his lamely apolitical joke about cherry-picking the best of what each party has to give. But there’s no forgiving the weakness of gags such as the one about Boris Johnson being “the political equivalent of Mr Bean”. (On the UK’s most joked-about man, we’ve a right to expect better than that.) Elsewhere, a section on Caton’s recent house move leans on cosy class cliches about cardigans and The Archers.
This material, about the 33-year-old finally leaving home and moving to a genteel neighbourhood, is ostensibly the meat of the show. And while the trope of middle-class whites being scared of black people is overworked for self-mocking humour, it yields laughs. But Caton soon moves on, flitting from British Airways check-ins to Brexit, from his “PlayStation and porn” hobby (Caton is not shy of a masturbatory mime) to his cross-cultural love life. The latter supplies one flimsy gag about being sexually rejected in favour of a Calippo, and one droll image of our host’s reaction, on visiting his Hindu girlfriend’s parents, to being confronted by a house full of swastikas.
The liveliest moment finds Caton discussing the N-word, from its deployment by excommunicated Tory MP Anne Marie Morris to its reclamation by some black people today – of which Caton is amusingly sceptical. Here is a rare instance of a contentious opinion, ventured without apology. The show could do with more of them.
- At Soho theatre, London, until Saturday. Box office: 020-7478 0100.
