Comedy / alun cochrane
Review: Alun Cochrane/Mike Newall
In the course of his routine, Alun Cochrane scoffs at the idea that his is the most difficult job in the world. “It’s easy. Anyone can be a comedian.” But having seen his support act, the audience knew different.
Mike Newall proves that there is more to being a comedian than standing on stage recounting some amusing incidents from your life. Without all the comedic engineering which a good comic hides under a patina of effortless chatter – the rhythm, the build-up, the ebb and flow in which a small aside or one-liner can build into an entire segment – the person on stage is not a comedian: he’s just someone telling you something that he hopes you’ll think is funny. And that’s Newall – like the dull, anecdoting friend of-a-friend you meet in the pub on a Wednesday night after work.
Luckily the main act is a consummate comedian, despite repeatedly warning his audience that he’s boring. And it is indeed true that you will learn a lot of astoundingly uninteresting facts in the course of Cochrane’s set – it’s not a ‘three-point turn’, it’s a ‘turn in the road’ according to the Highway Code – with Wisdom Alerts delivering advice on everything from offset mortgages to dinner parties (“if you haven’t joined the dinner party circuit yet, I should warn you that the emphasis is mainly on the ’dinner’ rather than the ‘party’”).
Yet Cochrane’s deadpan delivery and appealing willingness to reveal his vulnerability and laugh at himself makes such material funnier than other comedians’ carefully crafted gags. He may appear to revel in his own boringness (“I’d love to ‘drive it like you stole it’. But I drive it like I hired it on a particularly prohibitive vehicle excess charge”), yet underneath is a remarkably confident comedian, prepared to venture into areas of mundanity that other comedians avoid for fear of losing their audience.
As a master of his art, Cochrane manages to take them with him, culminating in a discussion of the merits of polo shirts as sleepwear which should seem dull even in the pub on a Wednesday night after work. He may have wanted to call his tour A Show With a Boring Man In It, but an evening with Alun Cochrane is far from boring.
Alun Cochrane and Mike Newall played The Lantern on Thursday, Feb 18. For more Colston Hall/Lantern comedy lineups, visit www.colstonhall.org/whatson/Comedy
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