Character comedy is slowly but surely leeching into stand-up. Many comics now have a stage persona which they affect with the purpose of complementing the brand of comedy they peddle. Of course, crucial to this idea is constancy and consistency; watching Lewis Schaffer did not bring either of these words to mind. Words it did bring to mind were disjointed, frenzied and, all too often, awkward.
Schaffer’s stage persona appears to be a shabbily suited, disillusioned, middle-aged man. His jokes often worked with this; a self-deprecating and un-PC style of comedy was evident from the outset. While some jokes generated laughs, others that relied on shock value or had a particularly disaffected or blunt outlook on life resulted in the silence left when the audience are still waiting for punchline, unaware that it has already come. Schaffer also veered between lucidity and confusion, repeating certain words, phrases and even whole jokes constantly, as well as rebuking himself for bad jokes whether the audience laughed or not, saying ‘that’s bad, that’s very bad’. This didn’t exactly put the audience at ease, or help us get in tune with the style of humour that was being pursued here.
Un-PC humour may have generated more of a reaction before a certain ginger Scottish comedian made it almost passe through over-use, but Schaffer’s jokes were often either not really that shocking, not that funny, or just too far to be funny. None of these gags, however, managed to be that offensive, even though it seemed as if they were only there to get a reaction of any kind. Also, while deriding and insulting the audience might sometimes work, the irony of Schaffer telling us ‘don’t come back’ and that we were a ‘terrible audience’, left us all a bit confused, as it was not immediately clear as to whether he was joking or not.
Schaffer’s jokes did sometimes hit the mark nicely or genuinely surprise the audience with their wit, but too often Schaffer was just simply talking about things, a lot of which weren’t at all funny. In the same way as the pub drunk, you occasionally laugh at him, but the ramble of non-PC and self-deprecating, nihilistic, I’ll-tell-you-what-I-think stories and jokes starts to grate and bore eventually. This clashed with any decent material in this routine, making the end result somewhat messy and somewhat tiresome. This was a shock comedy show that was not especially shocking or especially funny.
