The Cat Laughs 2012 - Day 2 Review

Written by: Jay Richardson
Published: Saturday 2nd June 2012

Friday 1st June, Langton's Ballroom, Kilkenny.

Jack Dee

Irascible as ever, Jack Dee took the opportunity of a rare solo show at The Cat Laughs Festival to bemoan the quality of his gigs since he supposedly sacked his agent and began booking for himself. In fact, Langton's Ballroom is a rather grand and oddly ornate venue for stand-up. But he surveys his surroundings with his usual mixture of contempt and resignation.

Twenty-five per cent of his audience are fans he speculates, the rest good-natured enough to be bullied into something they don't really want to see. After the obligatory bit of local observation, the pitfalls of ordering a full English Breakfast in Kilkenny and the plastic bag-swinging chancer who begs a Euro from him to get back to Dublin, he offers his thoughts on Belfast's recently opened Titanic museum, a folly to folly that you suspect secretly delights him. Certainly, it affords him the chance to wish ill on those who chose to recreate the ill-fated voyage recently. And to play the luckless dope in the museum's lottery of who "survives" the exhibition.

More interesting is a routine he presages with "you might think I'm a little bit racist". A lost family of Japanese tourists in London seek his help but he struggles to understand them, applying his usual logic of direction-seeking, whereby you give someone three opportunities to make sense and then you ditch them. Notwithstanding the caricatured oriental voice he semi-reluctantly adopts and the stereotyped, "involuntary" hand gestures that come over him, it's all (just about) framed within the acceptable bounds of reportage.

Frustratingly though, it's a hell of a lot of build up for the kind of lazy pullback and reveal gag that Dee occasionally relies on. Still, at least it segues into funny musing on what public transport would be like if everyone were as racist as black cab drivers. There's little light and shade to his characterisations - the electrician who arrives to fix the bulb in his garage is predictably shifty and inscrutable, angling for a free cup of tea or coffee. But Dee can be as petty or pedantic as anybody who irks him, challenging a workman who boasts 'no job to small' with increasingly trivial demands.

In spite of this, he plays the frustrated everyman, decrying the Government's guidelines on alcohol consumption and the surliness of his teenage kids. Loaded with personal detail, this is by far the most satisfying part of his set, as you empathise with his fears about his daughter coming home late at night and her sly manipulation of his parental concern. Chastising his son for boorishly calling fireworks "gay", he hilariously relinquishes the moral high ground with a snap homophobic judgement. There are some amusingly related, po-faced lines on how he's personally blossomed since adolescence and he has fun picturing Jesus' troubled teenage years.

Again, he hints at more compelling, personal material to be explored when he alludes to his struggles with religious faith. And he briefly takes atheists to task. But rather than expand on this, he has an easy pop at conspiracy theorists. His sneering persona serves Dee well but you find yourself hoping for greater ambition sometimes. Sticking it to grapefruit for having the temerity to claim itself as one of his five-a-day isn't pushing anyone's boundaries.

All of which makes his encore all the more surprising and enjoyable. Returning to the stage immediately with an undersized guitar, he threatens a medley of seventeenth century folk music. Instead, he reels off an oddly poignant summary of dead end jobs that he had before becoming a comic. Complete with a semi-thrashing rock solo, misanthropy and self-loathing emanate from every line, but recalled for a packed ballroom hanging on his every word, it's a triumphant moment.