Monkey Barrel: Hive 2
July 28th-August 24th (21:00)
Having famously graced the stage on Live at The Apollo, won awards, and had the kind of access to The Blue Peter Garden most of us can only dream about, Jonny Pelham is, this August, inhabiting a much more down-to-earth performance environment. He begins the show by addressing the incontinent elephant in the room. I’ve seen numerous shows in this venue over the years, and spent more Friday nights dancing in it’s environs than I’d care to admit, but never have I seen a performer have the confidence to just come out and ‘name’ the issue.
‘Yes, it’s not you. It does stink of piss in here. God knows who they think they’re kidding with the scented candles at the door?’. The small, midweek, ‘beginning of the Fringe’ audience all laugh as he spends a further five minutes ad-libbing on the theme of ‘this is what The Fringe is all about’, warming up the crowd with directness, sharp lines, a couple of genuinely dark jokes and a ‘telling it like it is’ attitude to the olfactory purgatory we find ourselves in. So far so good.
The title of the show, ‘Is it Me?’, alludes to Jonny’s seemingly never-ending list of self-identified flaws, failures & fuck-ups. From lack of appropriate social skills when his dog’s backside gets a flirtatious sniff from a canine Casanova, through ‘being bad at keeping friends’, to sexual foibles and ‘generally having a bit of a weird body’. These jokes are all delivered well enough to keep the audience warm, entertained and regularly clapping and laughing with abandon. Jonny is clearly well-practised in the art of nailing ‘Low Status’ as a stage persona. Around ten minutes into his set proper however he delivers a self-deprecating statement on his success and abilities as a stand-up performer, which fits with the persona, but does not chime with the sharp, acerbic, and incredibly insightful material which peppers the rest of his show, and on which he closes his set. More on that later.
As a self-rebuttal to his own suggestions of inadequacy, throughout the show he gradually alludes to his recent (multiple) mental health diagnosis related to his experiences of childhood sexual abuse, and asks us to consider if he really does have ‘ADHD’, or if he is only being prescribed amphetamines as medication so that he can ‘respond to emails more efficiently’, as many workplace mental health programmes and standardised assessment tools and treatments so often do. Much of modern mental health approaches seem to exist only to keep people functioning as useful capitalist drones. As he points out, we currently exist in a society in which ‘every political crisis is re-framed by politicians, and the media, as some kind of personal failure on our own parts’. All of this is leavened fantastically by neatly interweaving observations, and genuinely dark and hilarious asides, about the morality of bestiality etiquette, modern anthropomorphism of pets & emotions as a consequence of the death of The Social Contract, the Iraqi Paralympic team, and the only funny (hilarious actually) joke I’ve ever heard made about ‘straight pride’.
All of these interwoven asides are delivered in quite a different manner to the rest of the material, ‘high status’ even, and over the course of 45 minutes he manages to slowly but surely draw a damning portrait of a homogenised, consumerism obsessed culture and society in which we are all told that it is ‘us’ which is the problem, and not the pre-dystopian world we find ourselves in. There is a key phrase within the field of ‘Trauma Informed’ approaches, which is ‘instead of asking someone ‘what’s wrong with you’ try asking them ‘what’s happened to you?’. A slightly less polite expression of this same notion is ‘’Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes’.
Back to that self-deprecating statement near the beginning of his set then. When describing the ‘failure’ of his own stand-up career so far, Jonny mentioned that growing up he had been a huge fan of George Carlin, and compared that man’s performance at The Hollywood Bowl, in which Carlin skewered politics and inequality with satire, offense, and hilarity, to his own. Jonny is a stand out 5-star comedian when he isn’t pulling any punches, and given his ability to masterfully weave zeitgeist defining topics such as anti-psychiatry, the onanistic nature of ‘wellness culture’, politicians ability to punch down and blame entire demographics for their own political messes, and the homogenisation of culture to maximise economic growth for the billionaires and to keep the plebs in check, I’d suggest that to aspire to George Carlin status would not be much of a stretch for this versatile, intelligent and often hilarious performer. The low status jokes which are used as filler between the darker, or more thematic, sections kept the audience laughing, and all landed exactly as intended. I’d love to see Jonny fully embrace ‘high status’ though, cut much of the self-deprecating material, make the audience wait between laughs, and stick with the 5-star stuff which is the meat of the show.
‘I’ve not got this bit sorted yet’ he says at the end when getting ‘the bucket’ out for PWYW contributions. He then delivers a 5 word one liner which closes the show with peals and howls of laughter, demonstrating that, actually, he’s got it far more sorted than he realises.
Ewan Law
themumble.uk 