Fin Taylor / Lou Conran / Sarah Millican - Bobby Carroll's Live Comedy Diary

Written by: Bobby Carroll
Published: Thursday 19th September 2024

Fin Taylor's latest tour show Ask Your Mother is actually an expansion pack from his last tour show. His viral clips have seen his fanbase swell exponentially. So why not give us regulars an update, recycling old introductions to still fertile ideas and biographical info and then developing on it to new giddy heights. The new variations on last show's building blocks prove just as sturdy and giving as the load bearing familiar stuff. And to his first timer front row of weed dealers, KPs and potential incels it is all box fresh. The soft faces getting their first live blast of Fin will testify that the high quality level is indistinguishable. Probably on Reddit. Or 4Chan.

As always with Taylor, there are a plethora of attractively disagreeable thought lines explored throughout. He strikes on an early gusher of laughs when he considers the economic benefits of homosexuality. The gender pay gap inequality has never been probed quite so hard and fast from this particular angle. Oo-er!

This is murk but murk with shiny polished pronunciation. Like a siren calling us to our doom, Taylor's unfashionable takes on men's health, the eclipsing of the severely mentally ill, and disabilities in general, are monstrous melodies. Sweet verbal sandpaper. Illicit roughness gritted to rub closed minds up the wrong way. Taylor shares a lot of DNA with Alfie Brown "expressing woke ideas in an unwoke way". Shorter form, there is less of the dexterous vocab, making him more accessible to the TikTok clip guzzlers.

Taylor also has the sociopathic rhythm and thrust of Bill Burr, made palatable with less testosterone and aggression. The private school accent tidies the room up a little. He has the cheeky ability to stop a sentence just quick enough to leave the bad image in our brains while innocently moving on swiftly. What he says is knowingly "wrong" but there's little room to debate his playful counterattacks on modern sensibilities. Very few cracks and gaps. And even if his thinking does have flaws, he's moving at too fast a speed for you to get a fingertip grip into them.

Taylor flies when turning his totalitarian sighs of discontent onto his family. We welcome the return of his honking non-verbal daughter. Only now she knows how to express herself. Taylor's loving assessment of kids' positive development: toddlers are terrorists. We explore that metaphor to voluminous response. The duality of being a risqué, abrasive comedian and a decent parent concludes in a set piece when thoughts about Auschwitz keep intruding into his rendition of the Wheels on the Bus. Any other comedian, and this might be the point where the line is crossed. For Fin Taylor, finding a way to mistreat the unsayable is a mere leaping off point. Taylor slaps good taste and bad taste around with an expert authority. The market for this challenging brand of stand-up is only going to grow.

Finally someone has figured out there is still an appetite for big name tours stopping in Edinburgh even immediately after the Fringe. Sarah Millican and John Bishop played two of the city's largest venues on the same early September weekend. I would have happily enjoyed both but there is sadly only one Bobby Carroll. Almost a year in advance, Natalie and I have been booked in to see Millican at the Edinburgh Playhouse.

The Geordie household favourite gives her sellout crowd top value with two 40 minutes sets, plus a support. Opening for Sarah is an on-brand Lou Conran, stoking the room with twenty minutes of broad, take no prisoners, Milf filth. Don't be fooled by her sparkling sequin bomber jacket, this is dank stuff, with Conran punching up, down, left, right; anyone within reach of her gossipy swipes.

Much of it longform, much of it gynaecological. She spends a chunky five minutes acting out her unenthusiastic feeling of her frenemy's new fake tits from Turkey. And closes up by giving the middle aged crowd a demonstration on the "new" trend for "eating arse". I doubt few among the thousands here are really all that shocked by a bit of rimming, but the mortified reactions from my row suggested Conran's matey matey dirty dirty mode had obliterated any sense of false propriety before the first drinks had been finished. The room was prepped and desensitised for any topic the sweeter, more assured Millican wanted to explore.

Sarah Millican cuts a cosy shape gambolling on with a mug of tea and a yellow notebook of nostalgic C4. Her first move is gentle, unchallenging stuff about looking after gifted plants and her feasting on another unwanted present. Easing us in before stellar, impactful routines about her now husband's lack of clean towels and bedding and, later, a generous long yarn about a floatation tank visit. Both sections may seem like they are in the same safe tone, her trilling accent never budges unless blunting out a topper to cap a joke. Yet the content is full of unmentionables. X-rated blurts and spurts softened with fabric conditioner and verbal pot pourri. Never mind the dried jizz or inflamed fanny... isn't she lovely.

The cohesion in Late Bloomer is minimal. A school photo described, but never seen, presents teen Millican as a sexual innocent. Not entirely out of choice. She compares her status to her more experienced classmates. She christens them Eager Beavers but she clearly infers they are, for want of a less 20th century term, slappers. There's a rewarding stroke of nostalgia to the secondary school memories. More magazine's notorious "position of the fortnight" is recalled in an accurate description. Do the present day confessions prove a counter balance to all the cringey coming-of-age? Not really. They are fucking funny though so who cares about the thematic looseness?

Watching one of the UK's very best does produce an unpredictably volatile vibe. One young person in front of me was reading Charlotte Perkins Gilman' feminist classic The Yellow Wallpaper during the interval. Next to her was a socially awkward mum, dad and grown daughter. On the other side was a woman who nearly instigated a Mexican wave when hearing the words "menopause" or "binge drinking" in set ups but was too busy brain farting away to ever hear a punchline. There was a tense interaction with a front row dickhead who mid-show decided he didn't like his seats. Millican gave him one chance to shut up and reminded him exactly whose name was on the ticket. She got a massive roar of support and the gobby teat soon exited. But to the trained eye she then clearly moved off the intended set list for a little while to give herself a chance to compose herself after the unpleasant crowd control. She had the authority and a bit of back pocket gold to fall safely into. That's your raised in the clubs chop right there. And it isn't like the stand-up star is afraid of crowd work. Twice, later, she opens the floor up to the audience asking them to reveal weird shit in their handbags (MARGARINE!) and to rank the state of disrepair their current knickers are in. Brilliant comedian, dodgy atmosphere.

Fin Taylor: Ask Your Mother is on tour across the UK and Ireland until Thursday 24th October 2024.

Lou Conran: Tangent is on tour across the UK until Monday 9th December 2024.

Sarah Millican: Late Bloomer is on tour around the world until Wednesday 25th March 2025.

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