Surreal humour is usually considered to be at odds with a comedic mainstream, though many who are named practitioners of the surreal are some of the most broadly watched of comics. Milton Jones will play every night this month to the cavernous Assembly Hall, and last month he aired the seventh series of his long-running Radio 4 sitcom: his brand of ‘odd’ one-liners is one that is completely embraced by the comedic establishment despite being posed as an oddity.The atmosphere of the show is very much one of a performer preaching to the converted, rather than his working to win the room with the quality of his material. Though this doesn’t detract from Jones’ skill at warping words into brilliant punchlines, the mechanic regularity with which he delivers joke after joke, each a clever piece of sleight-of-hand, each warmly and kindly received, felt monotonous by the end of the hour.It is probably unfair to speak too harshly of Jones’ individual performance on the night. The issue is rather that of the format of pure one-liners, unpunctuated by techniques used by comedians of a similar style, like the lunatic asides of Steven Wright, or the deliberate tension in Tim Vine’s desire to raise a groan as much as a laugh. This sadly overshadows the flashes of brilliance that emerge. Jones is a master at springing a trap within a phrase, or in the case of his emphasis of the ‘sham’ in ‘shampoo’, a single word.The opening portion of the show is delivered, with requisite clothing and limp, as ‘Milton Jones’ grandfather’, and this twenty minute warm-up segment shows the real high-points of Jones’ act. Once anchored around a character, the one-liners could build to achieve a kind of collective density – Jones brilliantly deploying a repetition of the same lines to refresh his memory and to welcome each new latecomer in the audience, to the delight of the rest of the room. When Jones drops the character, we are thrown back to square one with the beginning of each new line, built up to a punchline then made to repeat the process ad infinitum. With more in the direction of characterising the teller of the one-liners, Jones could create a better sense of sharing jokes with the audience, rather than the audience coming to passively watch a famous exhibit.
