Sarah Kendell is thoroughly won over by the legendary musical comedian at the Greenwich Comedy Festival's first night.
It’s the first night of Greenwich Comedy Festival, and unfortunately the heat wave that blessed the first few days of September has well and truly disappeared. In that typically British way, the attendees of tonight’s much anticipated sell-out event huddle shivering in their summer jackets as the wind blows fresh off the Thames into Greenwich’s Old Royal Naval College, revelling in these ‘last days of summer’ whilst simultaneously praying for the Big Top to open for admission.
The chilly breezes of the outdoors are soon forgotten, though, when we take our seats inside the cosy tent and begin tonight’s comedy proceedings, initiated with a boisterous bang by compere Dan Atkinson. Radiating energy and enthusiasm, with just the right amount of the British sense of order to keep things rolling along, I can see why he’s one of the most in-demand MCs on the circuit. He also initiates what will be the two long-running themes of the night – self-deprecating jokes about being a South Londoner, and laying into one poor chap in the front row who states his occupation as ‘radiographer’, which no-one seems really to understand.
First act Dan Antopolski is enjoyably surreal and lo-fi, but as is usually the case with this type of comedy, it’s not to everyone’s tastes, and elicits more chuckles than genuine helpless guffaws. His mastery of the one-liner is a particularly unusual talent these days, and much appreciated for lovers of a silly play on words such as myself (sample joke: “I went to the supermarket and saw a sign that said ‘2 for 1’. Tension among the musketeers, then?”)
Unfailingly brilliant as always is Tim Key, perhaps the only comedian I’ve ever seen who is as good on the second, third and fourth performance as the first. Unfortunately, describing exactly what it is that makes him so funny doesn’t seem to get any easier despite how many times I’ve come back for more. The punchy, surreal poems he delivers, with their final lines that often come so completely out of left-field as to be a sort of comic slap in the face, are definitely a big part of it, but it’s his laconic, smirking yet oddly silent stage presence that seems to add an extra dimension of the ridiculous to his performance.
But the man the audience has undoubtedly come here to see, as evidenced by the cacophonous roar that greets Atkinson’s announcement of his arrival, is Tim Minchin. Having never caught this virtual comedy legend of our generation previously, I wonder if he can possibly live up to the rapturous raves nearly every fellow comedy fan has descended into whilst describing his previous shows to me, but I shouldn’t have worried.
Like Key, it’s not simply Minchin’s comedy songs – incisive, fiercely intelligent and deliciously dark as they are – that make him a stellar performer. His presence on-stage, measured at times, wonderfully exuberant at others, truly calls to mind the words ‘born showman’, in the tradition of an Elton John or a Freddie Mercury, but minus the cheese factor.
It’s not often I find myself spontaneously breaking into football fan-style raucous cheering and applause in the middle of a comedy show, but during Minchin’s set I do, several times – he’s just that good. I also join the crowd in loudly demanding two encores, and walk back out into the breezy September night a proud Minchin convert. Seriously, if you haven’t heard the Ginger song yet, YouTube it right now. Despite the hour-long DLR delay back to Bank, I was humming it all the way home.
The Greenwich Comedy Festival is at the Old Royal Naval College until September 11.
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