fri 29/03/2024

Andy Parsons, O2 Indigo | reviews, news & interviews

Andy Parsons, O2 Indigo

Andy Parsons, O2 Indigo

Mock the Week stand-up mocks the year in a touring show he's calling 'Gruntled'

Andy Parsons can do angry, baffled, sarky. He can have a swing and hit a bullseye. Take this, Alan Sugar. Take that, Ryanair. But you wonder, is he too happy for greatness? The title of the show he’s currently touring hints at a cheery disposition. Gruntled, leaving off the negative prefix, begrudgingly suggests an essentially contented world view. So too (without wishing to stereotype) does the loamy accent he carries with him from a childhood spent in the South West. Either I’m misreading the signs – for which I can only apologise - or he is unafflicted by neurosis, egotism and insecurity. These qualities are not attractive in friends and family, but they are rocket fuel to a comic.

It’s easy to imagine the source of Parsons’ inner contentment. Reviewers – and he quoted them – have compared him looks-wise to various types of shiny sphere. He may not always have looked like a freshly shorn brickie, but you can’t picture him ever getting stick in the playground. So his comedy does not arise out of that traditional desperation to escape a drubbing. It’s not the stuff of hard-wired instinct. Instead, he is more the intellectual stand-up. He thinks, therefore he jokes. For the most part those thoughts have a logical linearity. When he does go lateral, it comes with a well-flagged signpost. “That would be like...,” he’ll say, and serve up a clever oxymoron from his extensive collection. Never cleverer than his thoughts on a political alliance between conservatives and liberals. “That would be like the no swearing fuck party.”

Mock the Week has swollen his audience enough for him to fill the stalls of the O2 Indigo (the circle looked empty). He gave them what they came for, training his weapons on the things you expect his kind to attack. Sarah Palin, bankers, Prince Harry, Waitrose sit slap dab in the middle of every comic’s current gunsights. These are compulsory subjects, the stand-up’s GCSE Maths and English: mock the year. Parsons became much more his own man in surgical strikes on the absurd and the illogical. He took a rationalist's scalpel to the British Government’s stingy policy on incentivising couples to stay married, and the  Irish Government’s surreal offer of cheese to its strapped citizens. The baffling jiggery-pokery of homoeopathic medicine came in for deconstruction. Meanwhile, rather than take a knee-jerk anti-Cleggian stance, he adopted an iconoclastic view on tuition fees. All good stuff, though maybe not the stuff of greatness.

In the end there’s something of the no swearing fuck party about a Parsons gig. He turns the air blue almost conscientiously, like a navvy meeting a performance target. He was glad to report that scientists claim the adrenalin rush supplied by swearing can make you happy. That'll be why he does it. (On his tongue it's certainly not the language of dyspepsia or disaffection.) But then along with the Anglo-Saxon he as frequently addresses his audience as “ladies and gentlemen”, for all the world like some old-school variety pro softening up a crowd of sharp-creased rotarians. It comes across as a kind of hedge-bet: like the coalition he mocks, Andy Parsons is both one thing and the other.

Add comment

newsletter

Get a weekly digest of our critical highlights in your inbox each Thursday!

Simply enter your email address in the box below

View previous newsletters