By Zoe Lyons’s own admission, the starting point for her touring show Little Misfit – that she’s never felt she really fitted in – is not, in comedy circles, a unique selling point. The same could be said of the whole 60 minutes. It’s perfectly engaging, but more like an extended club set than a show with a compelling new argument or theme to explore. Yes, Lyons gives her ideas a lively workout, and there are fine moments. But many of those ideas (Brits are polite to a fault; old people struggle with new technology) lack freshness.
That needn’t be fatal to your enjoyment, of course: originality isn’t obligatory. There’s just a sense tonight that Lyons is staying well within her comfort zone, and that some of her off-the-peg assertions about the world could do with a little more interrogation. We’ve a right to expect new perspectives from outsiders, right? – and that’s how Lyons paints herself here, as the ugly duckling Welsh child of Irish and English parents, aware of being gay and afflicted with alopecia from age 10.
She makes an effort – partially successful – to wrap this concept around a discussion of the new tribalism in the age of Brexit and Trump. That enables a scurrilous Theresa May take-off – Lyons has the PM down as reptilian – a good joke about voting for politicians who “say what we’re thinking”. There’s a weaker moment when Lyons takes alpha white male Clint Eastwood to task for moaning about PC. Nothing wrong with that, but the trenchancy of her attack is undermined by the admission that political correctness has often been corrupted or taken to illiberal extremes – which is akin to Eastwood and co’s point.
Elsewhere, the misfit concept lowers in the mix, and Lyons expounds on the transformative impact of new technologies, and the difference between the British and the Dutch. (Her wife is from the Netherlands.) Both routines situate her firmly on familiar comic terrain, but she makes it her own. Our era of 24:7 connectedness conjures blissful memories of a time when “we could just ... fuck off”. Later, her dumbshow of the British horror of causing offence devolves into a choreography of flouncing and genuflecting. Perhaps, she proposes, this is how morris dancing was invented?
Latterly, the show meanders between topics, as Lyons takes her mum to Amsterdam’s red-light district, her wife on an Egyptian honeymoon and her supposedly racist dog for a walk. (Striving too hard for the comedy of leftie, bien-pensant social shame, the latter riff is oversold.) Nothing touches the success of an earlier routine drawing on Lyons’s religious education in 1970s Ireland. The spikiness of her takedown of those who justify their bigotry by their religion (“It’s unnatural in the eyes of God”); the demented physical comedy that makes of Catholic mass an early form of Zumba – in these moments, Lyons finds a focus and potency that the show as a whole lacks. What remains is diverting, but diffuse.
- At The Stand, Glasgow, 21 November. Box office: 0141-212 3389. And touring.
