As declarations of intent go, it’s hard to beat coming on stage directly after support act Bridget Christie and joking about ogling women in ill-fitting sports bras. Rob Delaney is not here to observe the boundaries of good taste, feminist or otherwise. But the audience forgive him: hot from the success of his and Sharon Horgan’s Channel 4 sitcom Catastrophe, the Bostonian has audience affection to burn.
He repays it with a more enjoyable show than his last major UK outing in 2012, when he was still best known as comedy’s king of Twitter. Then, his shtick was even more depraved (his word), and he hadn’t quite found the personality to sell it. Here, it’s flamboyantly juvenile, smutty and dissolute – but playful too. We’re never far from the sort of switchback self-contradiction (“I am kinda sad [my wife] won’t be pregnant again ... I fuckin’ hope”) that reminds us not to take a word he says on trust.
You could argue that this is the kind of “ironic” chauvinism that gives irony a bad name. But for my money, and give or take a few slips, Delaney pitches it adroitly tonight. On the one hand, he projects the high status of someone totally unsentimental about his (and by implication, our) venality. A meeting with a dairy farmer prompts a fantasy about masturbating with milking equipment. His only objection to drone pilots obliterating wedding parties in the Yemen is that it’s a little too easy to do.
But “I don’t mean that,” he’ll add. “It’s just a fun, terrible thing to say.” Like the S&M couple he talks about spying on through a gap in the floor, Delaney and his audience are playing a game between consenting adults, where we experiment with how much pleasure you can derive from fake amorality.
Plenty, it turns out, particularly with a comic voice as confident and a script as lean as Delaney’s. From the barometric pressure in the room changing when his toddler eyeballs him and takes a poop, to the doctor’s response when teenage Rob thinks he’s got Aids (“My diagnosis is: you’re dirty”), the show is chock-full of choice turns of phrase. And, usually, the puerility isn’t the joke but the means to a joke, as when a cheap gag about fingering evolves into a joke about Delaney’s chivalrous impulse to undo the damage wrought by years of bad fingering. With comedy, I’m pleased to say, his touch is surer.
- At Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, 26 June. Box office: 020-7960 4200. Then touring.
