Carl Donnelly has cleaned up his act. Two years ago, with his electric-shock afro, chinstrap beard and tinted, 1970’s-paedophile spectacles, he used to open with the line ‘Hi, my name’s Carl Donnelly and, yes, this is my real head.’Nowadays, with a more conservative look, he struts on stage to the electro-pop strains of Martin Solveig’s Hello (for no reason other than that he thinks it’s a really good song) and instantly has us in his thrall. Here is a man so affable, so quick-witted and so skilled in the art of storytelling that I wish I could pay him to be my friend.Unfortunately for me, however, the one thing his humour is not is cheap. We’re never asked to suspend our disbelief for an elaborate conceit with a killer punchline; it’s all about the well-told anecdote. Donnelly instinctively avoids the tired themes and easy laughs which seem ubiquitous in modern comedy, to give us an hour of eclectic snippets from his daily life, related with the casual brilliance of a true master.But the really impressive thing is, in amongst his tales (hilarious though they are) of accidentally pissing off cats, hardcore ‘novelty dancing’ and hijacking a floodlight at Glastonbury, it is his unplanned jokes which really shine. His banter with the audience gets the sort of laughs some successful comics could only dream of. In my opinion, the funniest moment of the show was his reaction to someone in the front row getting out a packet of Smints.With Carl Donnelly, you get the impression that if you somehow managed to erase the entire set from his mind just before he came onstage, the resulting show would be just as funny, if not more so. This degree of innate comic talent is a rare and beautiful thing: not to be missed.
