“I’ve just bought, literally, the loudest pigeon: massive coup. I went to the bar before the show. They had no sparkling water. Stiiill… I’ve got jokes for adults about the 1980s and jokes for kids about chocolate. A joke about insects: tick. A controversial joke about Winnie the Pooh. Tigger warning.”
It’s barely a minute into Danny Matinee’s 45-minute show and the pun-rich jokes are flowing thick and fast. The near sellout crowd in the Haldane Theatre are chuckling away and there’s still another 195 to cram in.
Matinee, 47, wearing a black-and-white paisley shirt, dark-coloured jeans and orange trainers, has lovingly constructed a finely-crafted show that even has him struggling not to snigger at times. From dating failures – “I went out once with a Scottish girl, but it didn’t work out, alas” – he segues into visual gags, pausing amid concern as he says to the audience: “Just trying to work out what the next one is. Bear with me.” Cue a pic of a bear from a handful he’s holding.
A big yellow bag, clownishly marked “Props”, is deployed for a slightly more muscular section, which starts with him painstakingly blowing up a 3ft-long black plastic barbell as the audience, at his direction, is left to its own devices. “Sorry about the wait,” he quips, his face creasing up into a pained smile, before flinging it behind him.
There’s some adept audience involvement, with members mouthing and finger-clicking appropriately simulated rhythmic sounds to a joke about a rap, with a picture of, you guessed it, a wrap; and variously providing the punchlines from a set-up and then the set-up from a punchline. “You’re hitting all your KPIs (key punchline indicators),” Matinee tells them approvingly.
His career path, shopping and travel also get a look-in as the tightly-packed set moves on apace, with Matinee looking into the audience to gauge and encourage engagement. The slick wordplay is matched by near-faultless timing and a good narrative flow, while the brain-teasing nature of the humour not only requires the audience members to be on their toes but effectively rewards them, intellectually and comedically, for doing so.
Matinee, aka Daniel Crewe, a publishing director originally from Colchester in Essex and now living in Clerkenwell in central London, can’t resist a good gag, though, even if it’s hard to know where to put it. “I’m currently researching a book about an Argentine revolutionary who died in Bolivia. It’s called ‘Fifty grades of Che’.”
At the end, fitting in with the show title, there’s a special award for little blonde plaited-haired Izzy, from Nottingham, who’d helped Matinee set up a black foldable music stand for one of the 199 jokes: a small multi-coloured whisk.
- 199 Jokes Before Lunchtime: High Whisk
- theSpace @ Surgeons’ Hall {Aug 8-9, 12-16)
