Sean Patton is a New Orleans native who made waves at last year’s Edinburgh fringe with a fine hour of storytelling comedy. I missed his raconteurship in this followup, which strings together flights of romantic fantasy and jokes about his OCD but stints on the big-hitting anecdotes that made his earlier set memorable.
We’re left with a slightly disjointed hour that feels like several club sets imperfectly combined, but which Patton holds together with a strong personality and a few choice gags. The shtick is schlubby underdog on the outside, wicked poetic dreamer on the inside. He starts with a riff on having his heart stolen by a former love, a metaphor extended beyond all good sense until that disembodied heart is leading a bleak life of its own, selling heart sex and having heart miscarriages.
It’s a catchy number, and there are others: the wordplays he deploys (but sometimes over-explains) to describe another ex’s hypothetical lesbianism; the bit about a “crazy homeless guy” momentarily recovering his sanity. But the quality is patchy. There’s a joke about the number 13 superstition that just doesn’t work. Another, about Louisiana’s neighbour, takes an amusing premise – the “Texas-sized” burger – and struggles to develop it.
The middle section, about wanting to have sex with Jesus, pitches for transgressive frisson – easier to elicit, probably, in Christian America than here. Patton’s finale recalls his heart-based opener, a masochistic fantasy about his ex-girlfriend’s new love life. It’s likably baroque, but out of the blue – he’s told us nothing about this apparently yearned-for woman until now. It’s a hit and miss set, the biggest miss being the storytelling skills that distinguished its predecessor.
• At Soho theatre, London until Saturday 28 July.
