Life’s A Joke, explains Terry North at the opening of the show, is a mixture of sketch and jokes. Whilst Terry North seems to be a reasonably affable bloke, I’m afraid his show didn’t make me laugh…at all. I’m fairly sure I didn’t even smile.
Terry started his career in comedy as, amongst other things, a writer for Hale and Pace. On paper that gives him some pretty good comedy credentials, but when you see his first video sketch (one originally written for Hale & Pace and performed by him and friends) you realise two things. One, why sketches like this originally needed the charisma and innate comedic talents of Gareth Hale and Norman Pace to sell them and two, why Hale and Pace are no longer on the air. His blurb describes the show as classic English stand-up. You could easily replace the word classic with old fashioned or outdated.
Terry is like the stock and trade comedian you’d find at any backpackers comedy room and his South London accent probably helps sell his material to this audience. He kicks off by asking the audience who’s from Australia, who’s from the UK, etc, a sign that this comic is used to working to British audiences travelling through Australia. And, despite the fact that he’s lived locally for some years, he pillages his ‘fish out of water – Englishman in Australia’ persona ad nauseam. Yes, Aussies do drink beer and yes, our spiders are big and scary (although I should point out that statistics show that, per capita, the English drink more beer than Australians, but spiders, yes, large and creepy). While some of the audience members seemed to buy into the ‘hilarity’ of these observations, most, like me, were looking more bored than anything else.
His video stuff was easily the best of a bad lot, if only for the fact that it broke up his banter which he ploughed through with the persistence of a herring. Just when I thought that maybe I was being a bit unfair in thinking him outdated, he brought out a Thatcher joke. There was also the great routine about trying to buy erasers in America and going into a store and asking for ‘rubbers’. That joke dates back to the invention of condoms themselves.
There’s not really much to discover here. This festival has so much better to offer.
For full booking details check out the Comedy Festival website