It’s fairly the undertaking, changing what Jordan Brookes does on stage – experimental, unstable, disconcerting – into one thing that will “work on Dwell on the Apollo”. However that’s Brookes’s said ambition with This Is Simply What Occurs, his first present since the award-winning I’ve Received Nothing, three summers in the past. His weirder excesses are reined in right here, in what – aside from the same old formal trickery – is at the least recognisable as standup. However let’s not get carried away: this stays comedy quarried from the darker subsoil of a disturbed soul, delivered by a person whose warmest smile nonetheless stirs a tincture of unease. Nobody is mistaking Brookes for Russell Howard any time quickly.
The present’s jagged backbone is offered by a specific insult directed at Brookes in 2019. It’s nothing, he retains telling himself: he’s over it now. However the entire present offers the deceive that, because the 36-year-old worries on the epithet in query, advertises to the viewers – and himself – what a swell man he's, then finally ends up re-enacting and chewing over the behaviour that pissed his critic off within the first place.
All of this takes us into intriguing territory, for Brookes and for humour. We’re nearer than his earlier work to confessional standup, however the nature of the confessions (the abuse he has obtained for being “ugly”; his love/hate relationship with promiscuity) is knotty and unresolved. He doesn’t, as different acts would possibly, tidy the vulnerability away, however leaves it lingering on stage, tainting – or is it bolstering? – the laughter.
On the present’s least impressed, it mines these laughs from “shitting your pants” or (a Brookes staple, this) erotic relationships with relations. Extra typically, he fashions the self-disclosure into nettlesome, off-colour comedy, just like the act-out about his practice journey to “Fucktown”, or the fracture staged between his self-justifying and his self-abnegating interior voices, between Brookes-as-victim and Brookes-as-perpetrator. That’s the territory of This Is Simply What Occurs, that existential area the place all of us should appraise whether or not we’re good folks or not, with simply our cussed subjectivity, and all our luggage, to work with. Will Brookes’s soul-search break him into the mainstream? Perhaps, possibly not – nevertheless it retains his comedy as enthralling as ever.
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