I’m not sure whether to review Micky Flanagan’s comedy or weigh it. The biggest-selling comedian of 2016 is doing 12 nights at the O2 Arena. He is the country’s most popular comic and, by some measures, its most popular entertainer full stop. At one point in tonight’s show, random cheering breaks out at the back of the O2 auditorium and Flanagan jokes that Michael McIntyre or Peter Kay must have set up a rival gig in the crowd. When you can joke, from a position of strength, that the best-loved comedians of this millennium are busking to pockets of your audience – well, you’re a long way from Billingsgate fish market, where the young Micky once plied the family trade.
Class identity, of course, is part of Flanagan’s gargantuan draw. Not because he’s an uncomplicatedly old-school, working-class comic, which isn’t – or hasn’t always been – the case. As his earlier shows documented, Flanagan is something of a class chameleon, an ex-window cleaner turned university graduate, an Eastender now resident in East Dulwich, as apt to be found dissecting his new-found middle class habits as peddling the traditional values with which he grew up.
That’s slightly less the case with his new show An’ Another Fing, which – as its title suggests – lays on the cockney shtick pretty fick. But Flanagan on stage is always more than a cheeky-chappy caricature. Yes, there’s plenty of nostalgia here for the meat-and-potatoes verities of his youth, but it never curdles – as, in the hands of other comics, it can do – into neophobia. He jokes frequently about modernity – new men, their grooming and preening; millennials and their earnestness. But it’s poking fun, not mockery; Flanagan never implies that his generation (or class) got things any more right than the ones that followed.
This good-naturedness, this absence of anxiety or meanness of spirit, is surely key to Flanagan’s wide appeal. Exhibit A: how he deals with the issue that besets any successful comic who bases their act on unpretentious Everyman appeal. “I’m fucking loaded!,” he says by way of an opener: “Shocking, it is!” I’ve seen other standups hamstrung by the difficulty of staying relatable while experiencing life-changing fame and fortune. Not so Flanagan, who defuses it with chutzpah and infectious self-irony. “For the next couple of hours, you’ve got to imagine I’m just like you” – pause for a laugh – “but with money”.
He makes it easy: the personality he presents on stage – well-meaning but workshy; shoots his mouth off, but a bit of a softy – is one with which many will readily identify. There are celebrity anecdotes here but (unlike, say, in John Bishop’s recent Edinburgh shows) not the remotest sense that Flanagan has gone native among the great and good. Soon enough, we’re back with Flanagan in the family home, where his dog plots to usurp his wife from the marital bed and Micky screws up the courage to announce he’s taking a year off work.
That sabbatical supplies what passes for the show’s subject, as our host disappears off the professional radar for 12 months. We’re led to expect eye-catching stories from the front line of idleness. But what we get isn’t much different from what we’re used to, as Flanagan haunts local boozers, watches too much daytime TV and goes on holiday with his ageing dad.
That latter anecdote, which closes the show, is a cracker, as fiftysomething Flanagan feels irresistible again (posing by the pool, dreaming himself Poldark) in the company of fellow Saga holidaymakers. “Look at him using the stairs,” he imagines the ladies drooling: “Sexy bastard!” Back in the real world, Flanagan’s love life is altogether less dashing, as he pitches up at the newsagent to buy his wife a “forgot-to-get-a-card card” and fantasises about a morning after with Mary Berry. Research for his recent Sky show supplies failsafe material, meanwhile, on “pegging” – the new sexual frontier, apparently, for vengeful women and their nervous partners.
Only occasionally does this drift into cliche or generalisation, as with the gag about women loving gift cards, or the deployment of hummus and quinoa as middle-class identifiers. More often, it feels as if Flanagan has weeded out lazy thinking, just as – with a routine decrying all those TV shows that make (poor) people look “thick” – he condemns it in others. I won’t pretend to you that this is adventurous comedy. But Flanagan is smart, generous spirited, at ease with his own ridiculousness and purveys a democratic brand of humour the vast popularity of which it’s impossible to begrudge.
• On UK tour until 5 November.
