“No one says, ‘Hicks. Pryor. Calman’,” says Susan Calman, ruefully. “I’m not a dangerous comedian.” By her own admission, Calman is considered precisely the opposite, a “Radio 4 favourite”: chirpy, erudite, unlikely to alarm the livestock. Now 10 years a comic, her touring show locks horns with that reputation, and asks: is she the comedian audiences suppose her to be? If that sounds self-reflexive, I can only report that the navel gaze has done no harm to the comedy. This is a good-time standup set, more assertive and upbeat – and at ease with itself – than the shows I’ve seen her perform in the past.
The most recent was 2015’s Lady Like, in which Calman recounted a nervous breakdown she experienced as she adjusted to newfound celebrity. No such shadows cloud this set, which is conspicuous for its energy and ebullience. Itemising the expectations others have of her (left-wing, intellectual, lesbian) – endorsing some, scorning others – there’s a real attack to Calman’s comedy here. She’s taken up boxing, she tells us – and this feels like 90 minutes delivered by a contender always on the balls of her feet.
Not that there’s anything to scare off News Quiz fans, mind you. Calman starts the show with caustic gags about Trump and Brexit, liberally name-drops Jupp, Hardy, Toksvig et al – and there’s a self-abasing section about her appearances on University Challenge and QI. She may wish to interrogate her connection to this world of witty wags and chummy panel shows, but her set – knowingly, cheerfully – reinforces it.
The pattern repeats elsewhere. Express horror that people associate you with jokes about “cats and Helen Mirren” – then dedicate a hefty routine to your cat, which is named after Mirren. Calman’s life with her spouse, moggies and her new house supply a sizeable chunk of tonight’s material. One droll routine concerns a guessing game her wife plays called “Gay or French?”, the funniness of which Calman multiplies by letting the game dawn on us – as it did on her – bit by bit.
Here as elsewhere, you can see the technique at work, and admire it all the same. Several jokes, like the one about her crush on Gillian Anderson, get laughs from suddenly shouted punchlines. Usually, that’s to reveal the screaming maniac Calman invites us to perceive behind her likable facade. Most of her material – about English perceptions of Scottishness; about being short – is straightforwardly likeable, and no less amusing for it. But there’s steel too, underpinning her material on the homophobia that has resurfaced with Trump’s ascendancy, or her routine about the patriarchy – for which she coins a homely new term.
There’s padding, notably either side of the interval, when Calman trails an upcoming book by soliciting tweets about kindness from the audience. But mainly, this is a brisk, effective set: not remotely dangerous, but sparkier and more swaggering than the “Radio 4 favourite” tag entitles us to expect.
- At Traverse theatre, Edinburgh, 1 March. Box office: 0131-228 1404. Then touring.
