Hoots Nic 3
August 3-30th
17:40
If laughter really is the best medicine, then David Hoare’s latest 60-minute chucklefest is precisely the prescription to see you living till 100. It’s a telling sign when, as a reviewer, I find myself having to consciously look away from the performer to make notes, and struggling to focus on my scribbles. Hoare demands your attention, & every time I glanced down to jot some lines I found my subconscious screaming with FOMO as the audience guffawed, chuckled & roared round about me. Like a life lived at 100mph, you find yourself racing towards the end all too soon.
The show itself is ostensibly a seminar. Hoare has been doing his research & would like to share the secret to a long life. Using the faux-seminar format allows him to embark early on audience interaction, and at least a third of our time is spent riffing, bantering & generally chatting with one of the most endearing performers I’ve seen in a long time. There’s something of the Carl Donnelly in his style, despite the ADHD-driven energy at the heart of this performance. Expertly comfortable & confident as he works the small early-Friday-evening crowd, the ‘seminar’ vibe really sticks, and the universality of his whimsical banter and incredibly silly mini-musical interludes means that, by five minutes into the show, everyone is playing along.
The seminar schtick is really just a platform for Hoare to show off the full range of his comedic talents. The mentioning of an ADHD diagnosis, about 20 minutes into the show, comes as no surprise to anyone, as mini flights of fancy, sound effects, jingles & public-service-announcement-style interludes à la Harry Enfield’s ‘Mr Cholmondley-Warner’ have been flying at us with a speed and ferocity akin to machine-gun bullets in the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan. If you didn’t get the last musical reference, or punchline, don’t worry—there’ll be another five along any minute.
The mini-musical interludes cover such a broad range of genres and eras that the septuagenarians sitting to my left are laughing along just as regularly as the Gen Zs in the front row, and David is so effortlessly likeable that even when the content of his lyrical interludes strays close to ‘K*nt & the Gang’ territory, all are still enchanted. I tell you, you ain’t seen nothing if you’ve not witnessed a room composed of Boomers, Gen Xers, Millennials & Gen Zs all having the lyrics of Lil Jon’s ‘Get Low’ broken down to them line by line. Ironic mansplaining, faux-intellectual snobbery & pun after pun punctuate his mini-streams of consciousness, creating a balance to what might otherwise be an onslaught of material.
The entire set is delivered with such joie de vivre that even the one or two curmudgeons in the room who, when first asked, weren’t actually sure they wanted to live to be 100, are by the end grinning and pleading with their eyes for ‘just a little bit longer’. His enthusiasm is pandemically contagious.
Add to this an array of disarming facial expressions, a cover of the Friends theme song which you can actually enjoy listening to, and the finest homage to Napalm Death’s ‘You Suffer’ I’ve seen, and this is easily top-tier stuff.
For a show about ‘How to Live to 100’, it may seem odd that there are no ‘big themes’ covered, no deep and meaningful insights, and no heart-tugging tales. It would seem that the trick to becoming a centenarian is simply to fill yourself with pure, unfiltered nonsense, and share it with some love, good company & plenty of music.
This is an hour of pure joy from a consummate performer.
Ewan Law
