Step inside the jester-in-chief ’s escapist bubble
Comedy Michael Mcintyre: Big World Tour Nottingham Motorpoint Arena
Michael Mcintyre’s latest show is like an emergency airdrop of laughing gas. You thought the winter was over, then it came back, and apparently it will keep coming back until we’re all glum as hell.
“How many f------ beasts are we going to have?” wails British comedy’s jester-in-chief, during his early bounding-about bit at Nottingham
Arena. “Are we going to be opening the fridge in the summer, ‘Look, it’s a mini-mini-mini beast!’?” Not the greatest gag he has ever told, but as ever Mcintyre has a knack for reading the collective mood and relaying his observations as if they were crowdsourced.
As the title suggests, this is his farthest-reaching show to date. He went across Europe last summer (he’s big in Bergen); his vaguely
Asiatic features were greeted with admiration in Hong Kong (“I knew they fancied me because they were lowering their pollution masks to flirt”); South Africa has just received him; they whooped him up in New York; and after his UK tour, he’ll go back to Australia. Within a decade he has come to
bestride prime-time TV and UK arenas like an entertainment colossus and he may yet conquer foreign parts with his atypical English effervescence. Perhaps the reason people flock to see him en masse is his refusal to widen his thematic ambit. Brexit doesn’t enter his escapist bubble. There’s a passing allusion to losing a nuclear war with North Korea (“My plan is to blend in”) but his preoccupation is with the under-noticed ephemera and minutiae that make up “our boring lives”. He turns adult trials into childish trinkets, accompanying everything from the operation of car hazard lights, to the would-be-seductive unstrapping of his lumbar-support belt (he’s feeling his 42 years) with carefree, camp-it-up mimes. Touring until Nov 11. Tickets: michaelmcintyre.co.uk