When your audience laugh whether you are funny or not, writing jokes might start to seem an unnecessary chore. BBC2 stars the Mighty Boosh are the hippest thing in comedy these days, and their fans hoot and cheer at their mere presence. Small wonder, I suppose, that Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt have come up with little that is new or amusing for their latest tour. Just wheel out the much-loved TV characters, and in the ensuing rapture, hope no one notices the material's thinness and the near total absence of jokes.
Absence of narrative, too. Surprisingly for the Boosh, who started out making freewheeling comic plays on the Edinburgh Fringe, this is more of a variety show. And their absurdo-psychedelic shtick badly misses the structure that a story imposes. The second half tries to compensate, with a sub-Ernie Wise "play wot I wrote" about the climate-change apocalypse by Barratt's hangdog alter ego, Howard. But the tale is hijacked by Fielding's preening glam pixie Vince in the character of a star-child from the future, and amounts to nothing.
There is an anarchic spirit behind proceedings that points towards fun. Fielding and Barratt are capable lords of misrule, not afraid of chaos or looking ridiculous. And their band play up a storm, so the songs supply in vigour what they lack in wit. But the material and its performance feel throwaway. Apart from his droll cameos as the delightfully naive moon, Fielding prefers flirting with the audience to inhabiting characters. But then there is little to inhabit: did anything here, any of this burble about blowjobs from millipedes and Lithuanian cabbies, take more than five minutes to write? Those besotted with the TV show may be whooping too loudly to notice. The rest of us will be underwhelmed.
