“The Facebook," Little moans, is a hub of narcissism and platform for vapid boasts. At 52, he harks back to a simpler time of rough parenting and outside bogs, and condemns the ‘Tory scum’ and obscure male-dominated lawmaking of today. Sure, his anecdotes are long, occasionally repetitious and can end on lazy puns that undo the genius asides before them, yet this is outlandish comedy - and unmissable for that very reason.
Little wants to become the sage of Glasgow, and treats The Stand as his nightly AA meeting - only his is a legitimate stage
Alcoholics (the idiotic ones, anyway) are brutally condemned, the efforts of those who’ve lost weight diminished, and the intricacies of Xs and emoji - the latest in potential linguistic pitfalls - overblown. But when Little speaks from the heart about his hometown tenement, of his man-of-few-words father, let-down religious figures and sudden deaths, this is when he shines. Ruthless he is, but one wishes this ruthlessness had been used to stamp out the loud ‘whispers’ of the front row (“shush” just wasn’t enough).
It was as if Little kept appending more insights, at one point declaring “2 more things to go” as he grappled with an unruly, and might I say fairly unwitty, section of the crowd. In spite of this overflowing, slightly uncontrolled energy, every concern, each expressed with a distinctly urgent force, packs a considerable punch
.
A sexed-up story of the Texas Obscenity Statute (an actual statute hilariously) is really a sly belittling of addiction, and the laughs keep coming. Little wants to become the sage of Glasgow, and treats The Stand as his nightly AA meeting - only his is a legitimate stage. This comedian’s had a rocky past, but Just Trying to Be Friendly doesn’t give a toss about the X-Factor sob story; it’s urging us to prove ourselves and make the most of what we’ve got, no #feelingblessed warranted.
