What is the basic unit of comedy performance? As comedy festivals spring up nationwide, as the Edinburgh fringe expands annually and spawns ever more touring comics, the hour-long solo show has started to feel like the art form’s default setting. But it isn’t. As any casual comedy watcher – the occasional visitor to their local club; the magpie Live at the Apollo viewer – will tell you, standup is usually served in 20-minute chunks. The Greenwich comedy festival, now eight years old, celebrates this species of comedy. Over five days, in the grounds of the National Maritime Museum, the country’s higher-end acts (Dara Ó Briain, Alan Davies, Adam Hills) rub shoulders in a tent.
Much is made in comedy of the progression from club set to full show. Some acts take years honing the skills, or plucking up the courage, to make the leap. But what of the leap in the other direction? On Saturday in Greenwich, I watched three acts who I usually see in long-form mode. Of course, you’d expect comics such as Bridget Christie and Dylan Moran to be excellent whatever the time slot. But what sacrifices do they make when they don’t have time to develop an argument? What routes do they take to a faster, flightier kind of laugh?
Christie’s set concertinas her standup career, offering anecdotes from her years as a clownish character comic plus extracts from her Brexit show Because You Demanded It and caustic domestic material to boot. Her leaving-the-EU material lambasts Cameron, Johnson and Gove for their responsibility, and frequently collapses into gibbering abuse. That’s not a criticism. Christie’s very funny shtick is her inability to keep a lid on the impotent fury. She creates neat little vessels for her anti-Brexit opinions (the horticultural metaphor; “the Ladybird Book of Brexit”), but all of them collapse finally under the weight of her irrepressible dismay.
Probably there’s no safer ground than the Greenwich comedy festival for this distraught remainer material. But – unlike when audiences come to see her and her alone – Christie can’t take that for granted. So her other 10 minutes move on to more relatable territory. Relatable but not agreeable. She opens by telling us how boring her children are; then there’s a standout routine about her depressing marriage that blandly transcribes a conversation about what food to salvage from the fridge and have for tea. It’s deliciously teasing stuff, a game of chicken with our expectations of motherly or wifely love.
On the basis of this mixed bill alone, you won’t go far wrong in club comedy if you harp on domestic disharmony. Opener Ivo Graham, who has turned the social awkwardness and emotional damage borne of an Eton education into the stuff of a promising standup career, majors on a recent holiday he took with his mum and dad. It was all going well until they spotted him masturbating through the frosted glass walls of the bathroom.
Headliner Dylan Moran dedicates much of his set to the undignified role he plays in his own family life – cowed and apologetic in his wife’s company, a massive irrelevance to his kids. You may not want to watch a whole show of Moran playing the beleaguered husband and dad. Probably, across two hours plus, he wouldn’t deliver one. (American fans can find out this week: he’s off on a US tour.) But here, Moran elevates familiar material with his trademark rumpled lyricism and the sense that this elegiac midlife comedy derives from deep thinking about what actually matters in our lives.
There is nothing glib about the Irishman’s standup, which – for all the sozzled playing style – looks, clear-eyed, at the mores of modern existence in general and his own existence in particular. “You look at your life, and it looks back and makes faces at you,” he says, wondering with more amusement than alarm how he became so meek, so “unknowably bland”.
There’s a lovely forensic routine about strategies for conciliation after – horror of horrors – he finds himself being inadvertently honest with his wife. Another joke marvels at the constant entertainment available to his kids, as opposed to his own youth, fondly remembered, when “there was fuck-all, freely available to all”.
These couldn’t be more mainstream topics for standup, but Moran ensures they seldom feel secondhand. Meanwhile, the image of an ageing softie is intriguingly offset by his exchange with a woman filming the gig from the stalls, which is skilful and stinging in equal measure.
It’s a matter of taste whether you’d choose this wham-bam club-comedy format, which foregrounds one-off gags over cumulative power, variety over depth of engagement – and, broadly speaking, consensuality over risk. With its bill of big-hitting acts, the Greenwich comedy festival provides several enjoyable occasions to go short form, and few can have been more enjoyable than this.
