Sam Simmons review – sublime oddity from aggressively silly standup
Soho theatre, London
By his own standards, the 2015 Edinburgh Comedy award-winner plays it relatively straight in his new show – but there are satisfyingly daft moments
‘There are pockets of joy,” says Sam Simmons, peering out over his audience, but he also claims to see mainly confused faces. This is what the aggressively silly Aussie comic does: berates us for our under-appreciation, feigns his own failure. It’s a tactic, of course, to emphasise his weirdness, to ratchet up the absurdity and alienation of an already absurd act. And it hasn’t done Simmons any harm: he won the Edinburgh Comedy award two summers ago, and is, if tonight’s mantra is to be believed, “doing really well overseas”. (He’s now based in LA.)
It’s a risky tactic, though – in that, if you tell an audience often enough that they are not enjoying themselves, they might start to believe it. That was partly my experience at this performance of his new show A-K, when Simmons’s compulsive commentary on how his jokes were being received overshadowed the jokes themselves. That left the show, which arrives at the Edinburgh festival next week, a bit disjointed. It doesn’t help that this is Simmons’s most loosely conceived offering: there are fewer props, gimmicks and convoluted set-pieces, and it more closely resembles standup than the carnivals of oddity he has served up in the past.
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