Comedy Congregation at Madame Jojo’s
The strapline is “The finest British comedy and live music on a school night”, which the event partly lives up to. This is a new night running every 4 weeks at Madame Jojo’s in Soho and has the potential to be a cracking night.
With a good-natured audience predisposed to give the performers a chance, the opening night wasn’t bad, featuring a line-up of Rob Deering (plus his band “The Iconoclasts”), Dan Atkinson and Stewart Lee performing an extended set. Rob Deering opened as compere in his usual amiable style, warming the audience up with a few gags before introducing his band “The Iconoclasts”.
The slots the band performed through the evening were mainly comedy pastiches using original or covered material which very cleverly managed the difficult job of combining music and comedy without completely destroying one or the other in the process. They also had the opportunity to tackle a couple of real songs at the end, “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” (great) and Stewart Lee’s karaoke (more on that later).
Dan Atkinson shambled on in his usual style and treated us to a short set of his seemingly random musings on all sorts of subjects including drunken student behaviour, fertility problems and the differences between Leeds and London. At times the material appears to be drifting across the boundaries when he applies an unexpected twist to turn it round and create a hilarious punchline. The set was well received and laid a solid foundation for what should have been a great evening.
After the interval, the band briefly introduced the second set before Stewart Lee appeared on stage to give a performance which split the audience almost equally into those who found it hilarious and those who were left cold (and disturbed) by it. The routines used on this night are apparently being worked through and honed for an upcoming TV series, which may partly explain some of the looseness of the set. There was some genuinely good material in the set, but too often it was buried in the device of constant repetition of phrases (particularly in the piece about rappers, where the comic observation was that rappers aren’t as political as they used to be). A routine about celebrity hardbacks, focussing on books by Chris Moyles and Asher D was funny and well received but, unfortunately things went downhill from there.
The closing section of the show was built around the idea that, as the general public, we get the arts and entertainment that we deserve. As an example of this, he dissected the appeal of the well-known “Del Boy falling through the bar routine” from “Only Fools & Horses”. His method of demonstrating this by falling over then hanging backwards over the edge of the stage while shouting the content of the routine lost and alienated a large section of the audience before the end of his set. The return to the stage a few minutes later for a shambolic live band karaoke rendition of The Fall’s “Totally Wired” managed to make Mark E Smith sound like Smooth FM material by comparison.
Could have been a great night and probably will be in the future but the feel good atmosphere will rely on having the right acts. With Lucy Porter and Russell Howard lined up, this shouldn’t be a problem.
