Tony Law: Maximum Noonsense, The Stand
Tony Law, Canadian by way of Trinidad and Tobago, has been kicking around the comedy circuit for several years with a style of madcap humour that many have delighted in but others have found self-indulgent. But with Maximum Noonsense he has retained all the free-flowing joy of his comedy while reining in some of the slacker elements. It's a marvellous concoction of silliness and sly humour.
He starts with his “banter” section, wherein he ignores the women in the room and talks only to blokes about women and their weird attitudes to things such as rape and their driving. But then he interrupts himself to speak in the third person to say that women are statistically safer drivers and so his banter is nonsense. It's not the first time Law deconstructs his and others' comedy and comics such as Jimmy Carr, Frankie Boyle and Jack Whitehall - whether named or not - are the target for some clever barbs.
But if that makes his comedy sound negative, it's absolutely not. It's performed with immense likeability and Law carriers his audiences along on a wave of bonhomie. There are a couple of dips in pace as the humour gets a little too surreal - such as talking about his pirate and Viking uncles and the japes they got up to together - but he then he's off on another tack and the laughs roll again.
Along the way he talks about the madness of having three-year-old twins about the house, goes into an acutely observed persona of a rah Cotswolds resident who rubs shoulders with Jeremy Clarkson, Rebecca Brooks and David Cameron, and tries his hand at musical comedy, but which he says is a non-starter as he can't play an instrument and tell jokes at the same time. “Look at the concentration on my face - I'm like a dog staring at a fridge.”
Law's tour-de-force finale is an extended, utterly mad riff about racially dodgy elephants with several false endings, which only a comic with the surest of touches could pull off. But he is that and he does.
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