It takes more than a few smart routines to make a show. I left Boston comic and Saturday Night Live writer Sam Jay’s UK debut in no doubt of her skill but disappointed by her 50 minutes on stage. The problem isn’t that the two parts of her set – bawdy first half and satirical second – don’t dovetail. It’s that her good work up to this point is squandered by anxieties about the audience’s reaction, then by a rambling finale and abrupt exit.
It’s true that the reception is quieter than she might be used to in the States. Or at a club night, where the lurid opening section on her queasy memories, as a gay woman, of heterosexual sex (“I’m definitely not a balls-to-butt bitch!”) might raise the roof. But there’s laughter: the devil-may-care attitude and the jokes on her distaste for strap-ons and “dick juice” ensure it.
There’s plenty to enjoy when the show takes a cultured turn, too, as Jay offers a comedian’s contrarian stance on #MeToo and Trump, feminism (a white woman’s racket, she claims) and “gay cake”. With the exception of a big-hitting riff on the politics of women peeing, these positions – while often off-handedly amusing – are rarely well argued. A routine on “white men’s ambition” risks suggesting that other races and genders aren’t as enterprising.
Bum notes elsewhere include a routine on Jada Pinkett-Smith, whose UK profile is low. Then there’s the tailspin when Jay interrogates the crowd on its insufficiently vocal response, at which the show haemorrhages momentum. Later, she essays a closing routine on American history which evaporates into incoherence. Jay’s got talent, but on this evidence, not a show.
• At Soho theatre, London, until Saturday.
