Paul Tonkinson – The Anti Mid-Life Crisis

Many comics wouldn’t risk starting a show chatting about their hernia, but Tonkinson quickly gets up close and personal with his audience and their experiences.

His early section involves plenty of interaction, from the Scots / English balance of the audience, to liking chavs, to one man’s shiny white teeth. The Anti Mid-Life Crisis Show, he explains, is inspired by too many “quarter life crisis” shows from comics in their twenties. His approach – have fun with that. Topics whiz by – Northern Rock, getting the builders in, his children and their personalities, his drug taking past, gay men, and his upbeat approach to life – apparently risky, as people tend to “equate happiness with idiocy.”

There’s material on wheat avoidance, on the family pet dog training, and on relationships. It’s an old topic, but his examples and man / woman arguments use tight examples – sandwich making and her drinking too much – with plenty of reincorporation, which somehow avoids the well-trodden path feeling tired.

Throughout all this, he’s bringing back in those audience members he’s been chatting to. The chav, the copper, bright-teeth, hernia man. They’re all remembered and part of everything. His impressions and mimicry of his father, his wife, his children, even himself on drugs, bring the stories to life – for example “trying to act normal, in perfectly normal circumstances.”

He’s not done there. Religion gets a look, from Zen Buddhism, and its problems on the football field – via the poshness of rugby, and dissecting Rooney, Ronaldo, and penalty shoot-outs – to exploring Christianity. He ends on a story of getting a blow job from his wife, both the process of trying to get one, and advice on giving one. It should seem crude, but it fits with the wide-ranging topics covered, and is as funny, and upbeat, as the rest of the show.

This is a show with constant laughs, flowing easily and naturally from a confident performance and ready interaction skills. Where topics could feel old, he brings in a new twist so fast, there’s no time to do anything but laugh. During some of the interaction, he’s having so much fun, he’s almost corpsing – but few spotted it, because everyone else in the room is bent double too.

The over-riding impression is of a one-man party that you get to join in. It’s constant laughs, bringing in the audience, and he’s clearly having fun too. It’s infectious. And genuine, as he stayed at the door as the audience filed out, smiling, chatting, and with an appropriate word or two to each of this show’s ‘characters.’ Do spend an hour in this man’s company – just if you’re shy, not on the front row!