“I decided to sell my Hoover,” ran the joke that won Tim Vine the prize for Edinburgh’s funniest joke on the fringe last year: “Well, it was just collecting dust.” Collecting dust is precisely what Vine doesn’t do on stage. The pun man’s live act makes Harry Hill look sedate, as Vine clips along from one-liner to prop gag to dotty jingle and back again, the pace unrelenting. The resulting show hits exhilarating heights of silliness, especially for wordplay nerds like myself, even if it starts to feel a shade mechanical.
Maybe that’s because Vine doesn’t always seem to be enjoying himself. Mind you, he doesn’t seem to be anything: the self-concealment here is pathological. This is the brand of old-school showmanship that, these days – particularly when the comic’s on-stage regimen is so punishing – suggests a grimace of pain behind the slightly too strenuous wackiness.
Some variation of that tone, or a sense – beyond the jaunty “isn’t this naff?” pose – of Vine’s real relationship to the material wouldn’t go amiss. (He gets closest here with a lovely epilogue flashing back to his first brush with life on stage.) The material itself though, is mostly terrific. Of course the punning punchlines are funny. But so, too, are the tortuous setups, as Vine assembles the ducks in an unlikely row that will legitimate that “have to love Easter, baby” or Air Asia/Erasure payoff.
Funnier than any of that is the thought of how much time Vine must dedicate to identifying punnable phrases and contriving these precise little wordplays: an almost revolutionary feat of unseriousness. Caveats at his zaniness aside, the cumulative effect of these high-class Christmas-cracker gags – the ones about his green belt at karate, his chicken-proof lawn (“it’s impeccable”), and getting pranged by a panda – is to administer a concentrated shot of pleasure.
• At Birmingham Town Hall (0121-345 0600) on 22 April; Lowry, Salford (0843 208 6000) on 23 and 24 April. Then touring.
