Emma McAlpine heads down to the legendary music venue to check out their comedy night.
Greg Davies
I’ve been meaning to get down to the 100 Club’s comedy night for ages. Not only is it a really cool setting for a gig – held in the infamous live music venue on Oxford Street – it always has incredible line-ups featuring the likes of Stephen Merchant, Tim Key, David O’Doherty and Adam Buxton. Tonight’s show looks to be no exception, with 6 ft 8" comedy giant Greg Davies taking headline spot.
Our compere for the evening is Phil Nichol, whose demented kangaroo -on-caffeine act takes a little getting used to. From impressions of aggressive Londoners to his best jazz ballet moves, it’s a hectic performance with flailing limbs and screaming. Nichol admits he is usually last on club nights which might explain why his routine is met with blank stares for the first ten minutes. A compere is usually the warm-up but Nichol appears to have been on the highest microwave setting from the word go. Luckily the crowd starts to loosen up and his politically correct song ‘Haemophiliac Albino Cowboy’ gets everybody laughing and cheering.
The first act is Rufus Hound – who appears heavily influenced by the styles of Stewart Lee and Richard Herring. The majority of his material was basically one long knob gag (women: all you have to do to keep a man is suck his cock apparently), but it’s well-crafted and articulate with some surprising twists and turns. While the cadence and repetition of his delivery might come across as slightly derivative for Lee and Herring fans; his dry persona is a refreshing alternative to the mania of Nichol.
Everyone seemed to be talking about next act Colin Hoult last year - with good reason. One half of sketch favourites Colin and Fergus, the two went solo in 2009 and have both produced excellent solo shows. Hoult’s act is character-based and by god it’s good. He comes on first as Anna Mann, an overbearing ex-theatre luvvie. The nuances of her personality are brilliantly conceived from her pet names for people in the audience: “Do something spontaneous Big Bear!” to the constant references to random plays she’s been in that nobody’s heard of.
Len Parker
Hoult’s second character Len Parker is a karate teacher from the Midlands with a penchant for Transformers analogies. With a nervous ‘karate twitch’ and tips for twisting out of an attacker’s grip (“Grab my arm. Not that hard. See - he couldn’t hold on!”), he strongly reminded me of a passive-aggressive 'self-defence' instructor we had at school called ‘Sensei Jeff’. A gifted comedy actor who also works brilliantly with the crowd, he had the room in fits of giggles from the moment he came on till the minute he left.
Hoult is a hard act to follow and particularly for a comedian like Ed Aczel, known for his low-energy, anti-comic routine. His shtick involves a ‘nervous’ bluster through set topics written on his hand, at times drawing flip chart graphs to illustrate how the evening is going. There are some stand-out lines: “If the gig is going really badly, I’ll resort to my Steve McQueen impression. You’ll know it when you see it”, but after the buzz of Anna Mann, the audience noticeably deflates. I’ve seen Aczel a few times now and his routine seems to go down best when it stands alone as a solo show.
Also on the bill tonight are Dmitri and Vassily – two shambolic TV presenters from Russia and Georgia, played by Humphrey Ker and David Reed from The Penny Dreadfuls. It’s an entertaining set from the pair and something I’d have liked to have seen more of, as they engage in a wonderfully silly dialogue practising interviews with celebrities like George Clooney.
Dmitri and Vassily
Headliner Greg Davies doesn’t disappoint either, although there’s not much new here. Still, his classic anecdotes about a brutal massage from a dwarfish Thai lady and an embarrassing family dinner conversation are performed with such panache (and met with cacophonous howls of laughter), that it’s clear this material hasn’t gone stale yet.
As we all pile out, people linger outside excitedly discussing their favourite performers and dragging heavily on cigarettes in almost post-coital fashion. If it continues with gigs like this one, the 100 Club could become as renowned for legendary comedy as it is for music.
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