‘Nice breasts.’ That is Steve N Allen’s catchphrase and he works it into a surprising amount of the jokes in his set. Should make you want to slap him, right? However, he does it in this fantastic voice he has left over from his career in commercial radio and so he gets away with it. In fact, his whole show rolled like Steve N Allen’s own personal hour of radio banter, never pausing to take a beat.
He was quick to catch onto what worked and adapt his act around it, pulling more material by riffing from the successful gags and quickly moving on from the not-so-hot ones. His improvisation was impressive, topical jokes quick and practised on his tongue to mix up with his banter with the audience, ‘If Americans could understand your accent, Cheryl Cole would have had a career’ being my favourite to a strange Scottish audience member pretending to be American.
The show is structured around slides showing his favourite funny headlines of late and he uses this prop well as a lift but not a crutch to his material, a refreshing change from comedians who rely too heavily on their props to transition and end up with fragmented gigs that lack flow. This is how he breezes through the Olympics, PIP breast implants, banks, Peter André and (no news show would be complete without it) weather.
This is a tight, upbeat show that I would recommend going to see for more than just a shelter from the rain. As a break from his headlines he started asking the audience about their love lives: finding out who had had the longest relationship in the room; telling us that the best revenge a man can get on a woman is to tighten the bathroom taps; he even started digging a hole about my love life and reversed out before he could do too much damage - I’m not sure he saw my notepad.
