Very interesting to see the churn from the work in progress we saw a month or so - a lot of sketches completely added, a lot having been hopefully just put back in the drawer rather than fully discarded, and one sketch in particular still present but transformed by the change of a somewhat lacklustre original punchline to a very neat bit of structrual play. Since You Ask Me being in the middle of the show is the kind of thing that, if JFSP had Star Wars level fandom, would be causing outraged reddit threads, but it’s fun to see a bit of playfulness. And a meta sketch about the shift between sketch grab bags and conceptual stuff gives me hope that we might get something a bit more like that next year. But, even in grab bag form, this is stll one of the best sketch shows you’ll find on the radio.
Fun to come back to watch this a couple of years after seeing it in Edinburgh, and good to see it pretty much intact. I’m aware this is a paucity of imagination rather than anything else, but I do not understand how you cannot find John Kearns funny (despite the tweets after his appearances on Cats Does Countdown). It’s such a beautifully realised persona/character/whatever blend of the two you deem it to be. So rarely do you get to see a comedian have to reckon in real time, ten years into their career, with who they are as a comic, as their niche act comes into battle with a mainstream audience from Taskmaster. He can only, as he says, do what he does. I’m glad he chooses to. The way I lit up when I remembered the Marco Pierre White routine. God. He’s so good.
still playing
I remember watching James develop this show in realtime, realising that old material could be refocused to act as an epilogue to the “trelogy” as it was then before it was Repertoire. The bread research is exactly the kind of overtly written material I love; Kettering Town FC is just pure silly fun; ready to eat apricots was long his calling card for the US talk show circuit. But the new stuff, the duck routine at the end, is some of the best work of his. Watching that live for the first time in 2017 was the moment I decided he was my favourite comedian, and it works nicely on film too. A lovely bit of visual work for the wraparound at the end to tie a bow on the whole thing. The fact that someone so brilliant was the first person to release four simultaneous specials on Netflix is still a marvel, and we remain blessed to have it.
Show two of Repertoire. The Goose And The Sloth is one of my favourite things he’s ever written, and is a prime example of my belief that all good stand up shows have at least one moment that acts as a sorbet away from the main thrust. The whole thing builds nicely on the formula he established in Recognise without just being a retread. The opening off-stage intro is a delight.
Back to the beginning! One of the finest hours of stand up I’ve ever seen live, and it still comes off well on tape. Delightful to hear Nish and Ed Gamble laugh throughout, Nish before James has even said anything. There’s a blinder of a quadruple callback in the first 10 minutes, and one of my all-time favourite lines uttered on stage in a stand up show. Ceaselessly inventive and it remains an aspiration.
Joining Alasdair halfway through a rewatch of Acaster’s Repertoire (although I imagine I will shortly be back to the first two as a result). He’s so young! I didn’t think that at the time, obviously, not having seen the older version of him, but christ. A lot of fun routines in this one, even with the royalty-free cover of New by Paul McCartney being subbed in for obvious reasons.
I retain my habit of listening to podcasts or audiobooks on long journeys after concerts - something about not immediately overwriting the musical memories with something pre-recorded, an ill-advised and futile attempt at purity of experience. Ah well. I pick up Alternate Realities, a three episode series following a journalist’s $10,000 wager with his conspiracy-theory-befallen father, the hopes of which are that this will draw a line under it all and keep the family together. It’s all very interesting, really, and provoking in the sense of wondering what I would do, calcifying the worry of what if that does happen to one of my parents. And, to be fair, it doesn’t seek to stretch its story beyond the three episodes in which it fits, but I would have somehow liked more? It’s a bit anticlimactic - an episode explains the premise, an episode digs into the fracturing family, and a final episode examines the results of the bet. And it’s over. Maybe that’s how it should be, though, a stark ending to a stark tale.
Always a pleasure to get a new Birbiglia stand up show to watch. It is very funny, don’t get me wrong, but there’s a certain lack of cohesion compared to the admittedly high water mark of The Old Man And The Pool. But even sans the most satisfying narrative device, there’s a bunch of great individual routines, and it’s another entry in a very new sub-genre of stand up: recollections of the comedians invited for an audience with the Pope in 2024.
The sad moment of realisation that the reason I enjoy this is it’s a platonic ideal of what I want engineering management to be.
Still playing
Soothing little puzzle game, wonder if it’ll be any more than that by the end
Oh this is horrifically addictive and I am going to have to be very careful about how much or little I play this.
Replaying this for the first time in years, this time on the Switch. I forgot how quickly the death count racks up, but amazed at how much muscle memory I’ve retained. Wonder if that’s true for Super Hexagon.