Clad in tartan bondage pants and with fluoro-pink fingernails offsetting a similarly hued mohawk Wil Hodgson wears his punk ethics as easily as his Damned t-shirt. This is not a clichéd, aggressive anti-authoritarian version of punk but true punk – a refusal to conform to the norm.
Easy laughs? Engaging with the audience? Hodgson’s rejection of these stand-up comedy artifices/requirements proves to be a challenge in a show that is relentless in pace and dense with detail. Stylistically closer to one-man-monologue than it is to typical stand-up comedy there are certainly laughs but Hodgson in no way panders to a crowd looking for a comedic quick fix.
Kicking off with the wonderful incongruity that he collects My Little Pony merchandise we soon enter into his world of working class heroes and failures, pop-culture, racism, childhood disappointments, oddballs met on solo-pub crawls and a Big Mac eating challenge between lead singers of opposing skinhead/two-tone ska bands. Hodgson’s articulate diatribe even reveals his rejection of typical pornography –not that he objects to nude women, merely the bizarre, over-polished silicon portrayals found in glossy porn mags, he’s more of a reader’s wives fan. Again, kicking against the norm but not in a typical way.
Wil Hodgson is a highly interesting person – his style is challenging, his subject matter eclectic and even though the laughs aren’t thick and fast I doubt that I will see another such thought-provoking comedian.
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