Sanderson Jones provides the Comedy Sale of the Century, much to the enjoyment of Rupert Uzzell.
The adage that you should always ‘know your audience’ seems to have been taken quite literally in the case of this gig. The premise of the show is that stand-up comedian and self-confessed bearded layabout Sanderson Jones has attempted to fill up the Union Chapel in Islington with an audience comprised entirely from people he has met and sold tickets to in person. This is how my friend Jack and I found ourselves playing Beer Pong with him outside a pub in Clapham last Sunday afternoon.
Aside from being a very friendly and sociable idea, it also makes for an excellent show. Jones has mined some great material by raking through the Facebook and Twitter pages of his 750 new found acquaintances, picking out their most moronic or peculiar statements and affectionately ripping it out of them whilst they sit in the audience. He does all this with the aid of a PowerPoint presentation, video clips and a live internet connection. One particular highlight is a video montage he has assembled from pictures of one such victim who somehow has miraculously managed to pull exactly the same facial expression in virtually every single one of her Facebook photos. Such material is funny in its own right, but Jones provides his own extra comic augmentations to these discoveries and milks further laughs as a result.
The crowd are not the only source of amusement to be had though. The show is framed around Jones’s enthusiasm for the odd, irreverent and ridiculous, and as such, we are treated to an array of silly YouTube videos, juvenile pranks and anecdotes about his time-wasting antics. These include a systematic approach to altering the Amazon.co.uk recommendations facility, an intrusion upon a random gentlemen’s ‘enjoyment’ of the website ChatRoulette, and the hiring out of some scantily clad kinky nurses for the benefit of esteemed comedy critic Bruce Dessau. Sadly, Dessau hasn’t turned up to review the gig, meaning it’s up to Jones to chase the nurses around Islington’s historic Union Chapel, accompanied by the dulcet tones of the Benny Hill theme tune. He then leaves a vociferously scathing review of Dessau’s biography of Rowan Atkinson on Amazon.
These stunts all give an exciting sense of spontaneity and anarchy to the evening. However, there is also some entertaining, more traditional material to enjoy, including silly gags, puns, ‘sick’ humour, and even one brief observational bit thrown in for good measure. Jones puts his own spin on all this however, employing his familiar technique of using Venn diagrams to illustrate many of the jokes throughout the night. Much of the material is also tied together via a linking narrative about his love life, leading to a great pay-off that successfully wrong-foots most of the crowd. Jones delivers these routines with infectious enthusiasm and comedic verve throughout, and I’m impressed with how natural he is in front of a crowd considerably bigger than the ones he’s used to.
In keeping with the ambitious concept behind the show, the evening is capped off with a dynamic helping of spectacle. This includes a live choir, fire-breathing, dancers, and health and safety oblivious acrobatics. The standing ovation Jones receives at the end is richly deserved and I highly recommend meeting him for a game of Beer Pong yourself in future, so that you too can have the pleasure of catching him perform live.
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