April 23--At one point in his Chicago show at Thalia Hall in Pilsen Wednesday night, Simon Amstell, the popular young British comedian known for the quiz show "Never Mind the Buzzcocks" and now on a kind of American coming-out tour, noticed an audience member with red hair, outre attire and, he decreed, a palpable need for attention. A need that Amstell understood.
"Which parent didn't love you?" he asked, his voice rising to the semi-unconscious falsetto that tended to show up whenever Amstell talked about his childhood. "Your dad? Me too."
Amstell's father -- by his son's account, a once-inclusive Jewish man whose post-divorce religious conversion had left him with little or no acceptance for his gay son -- looms large in this show.
Many of Amstell's peers -- John Oliver comes to mind -- are satirists of the political landscape. Others -- Russell Brand comes to mind -- are natural improvisers and provocateurs. Amstell walks through a more psychological landscape, trapped in his childhood and mining his neuroses. He understands, he said, why sons learn to juggle to stop their mother from crying. And he also spoke of the day his mother, presumably exasperated, told her children, presumably annoying, that one day they may come home and find her gone.
At that point the high pitch returned. "This is the voice of truth," Amstell said, not unreasonably. "I mean, one parent had already left."
Amstell's appearance, part of a North American tour designed, he said, to establish himself as something other than "a regional comedian from a small island" and motivated, he said, by the truth that "others had done it," was the first comedy show ever at Thalia Hall, its owners said Wednesday. The shabby-chic venue -- programmed mostly with music and looking ideal for a production of Stephen Sondheim's "Follies" -- certainly is a fine venue for the bleaker end of stand-up comedy, although Amstell also has a rather cuddly persona, born in an attractive insecurity. At another point Wednesday, he spotted a youngish teenager in the audience, which caused him to second-guess, mid-orgy, his material about his own sexual fantasies. His faced scrunched into a ball as he looked at the teen's parent. "The show is written," he said. "I can't do anything." Indeed, given the place from where most of his stuff seems to come, he no doubt spoke the truth.
Following his hourlong set, Amstell reappeared onstage to take questions, always hazardous for a stand-up given the perennial inability for anyone in a comedy audience to actually ask a question beyond "Can we hang out with you?" ("No"). He regretted his decision immediately, he said, peppering his very lovable coda with "Oh my God"; "Why did I do this?"; "This was going so well"; "Oh, these questions are awful"; "Oh"; "Oh"; "Oh." The agony, which was very funny, did not seem manufactured.
I suppose Amstell could use more confidence, although that would kill half of his act, and, for sure, material that compounds and layers his laughs. He is deft at the existential non sequitur and his act could stand more of them: "How can there be homophobia when Elton John wrote 'The Lion King'?" he asked. "What does he have to do?"
And he is good at riffing off the obvious: "In England we have a queen. Not in the past. She's just wandering about right now." And, beneath it all, you can see him working through what he wants to be. "I was recently in Sri Lanka on a mediational retreat," he said. "And lines like that explain why this show is not at the Chicago Theatre tonight."
Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@tribpub.com
