In Edinburgh this August, Stuart Goldsmith will perform the world’s first crowdsourced comedy show, featuring jokes submitted by the audience of his hit podcast, The Comedian’s Comedian. But first he brings his 2016 set, Compared to What, to London, demonstrating the high standard to which those amateur scriptwriters must aspire.
An autobiographical hour, the show recounts Goldsmith’s recent engagement and new parenthood. It’s eloquent on the competing claims of city and country, youth and middle age, as our host hams up his horror at leaving fast-living London for bumpkin life as a provincial dad. The London-as-sergeant-major metaphor is just so; describing parenthood as “boring heaven” could hardly be bettered.
So there’s some great writing here, alongside conventional routines on midlife compromise and an anticlimactic number on feeling old at a summer festival. The latter dramatises Goldsmith’s reserve: he’s polite, not wild; considered, not instinctive. Fine personal qualities, but they can leave his comedy feeling a little measured. There’s an opportunity this summer for his citizen jokers to bring the jeopardy his act currently lacks.
Until then, there’s enjoyably ticklish material to be getting along with. Dads will savour the rueful humour of his baby-shooshing routine as Goldsmith over-commits to this most basic fathering duty. There’s real poetry, too, in his hymn to London’s filthy bustle, its triple-digit bus numbers and drivers to whom an amber traffic light is just an urgent shade of green. Like his new life, Goldsmith’s show is no rollercoaster, but it is not without its compensatory perks and pleasures.
- At Soho theatre, London, until 3 June. Box office: 020-7478 0100.
