At one point in this freewheeling show, Paul Foot pulls out a heap of colourfully illustrated flashcards and asks us to yield to the ‘glimpses’ of jokes they contain. These hilariously turn out to reveal skewed half-jokes featuring prostitutes, cheese shops, and occasional tables - which he footnotes by telling the audience that if we don’t enjoy them, that’s because ‘the mistake you’re making is searching for hidden meaning’. This is the crux of Foot’s material - his artistry is not to try and open his audience to new depths, but to present brilliantly polished nonsense with all the skill of a virtuoso - and the effect is blinding.With his bedraggled mullet, his gangly, flailing limbs, and his slurred London drawl, he marches around the venue like an ill-advised lovechild of Peter Cook and a circus ringmaster. The first section of the show, where Foot lurches in between the rows of the audience pondering the best way to start the show for a good twenty minutes is a tour de force of building tension and pure silliness; we see him drag himself onstage to practice lines that he will end up repeating verbatim later on. He pushes a comedian’s ordinary control of the audience that bit further by delivering whole passages of the routine in one person’s face - this intensity electrifies the room, his whimsical observations feeding off the shared understanding that he can take us where he likes. Whether this intensity is sustained throughout the whole length of the hour is debatable. There are moments when the show flags, when the observations seem a little too disconnected, and where the surreal surface can wear thin. An overlong routine centering on the use of a horse’s head on a stick that could be flipped upside down represents both the potential of his whimsy to become tiring, but also his wild imagination in its hilarious conclusion. Foot’s experience and confidence as a performer anchors otherwise disconnected moments. Looking at the show as a whole, its occasional faults and lags only serve to make the performance more endearing. A delicious oddity.
