Balladeer of Brexit proves that the Left shouldn’t have all the laughs
Dominic Frisby: Libertarian Love Songs Museum of Comedy, London WC1
Brexit could well be the making of Dominic Frisby. The 50-year-old son of playwright Terence Frisby (responsible for perhaps the biggest stage-comedy success of the Sixties,
There’s a Girl in My Soup) has been lurking on the margins of recognition since the Blair era, trying on various comedy hats.
His serious side, meanwhile, has been expressed – impressively – in financial journalism and a series of books that have attempted, post-crash, to get to grips with big questions about society, economics and technology. The first, Life After the State, signalled his anti-statism and he has just published what might sound like a comic death-knell: a book on tax.
His nose for the kind of subjectmatter most clowns would run a mile, from combined with his ear for comic opportunity, have yielded succulent fruit this year, though. Going one step further than most Right-leaning comedians would, he announced himself as a prospective Brexit Party parliamentary candidate. That has not come to pass (for logistical rather than ideological reasons) but he has done his bit to rally Britons to the cause of adhering to the referendum result with the rebel folk song 17 Million
F--- Offs that has been enjoyed by around half a million Youtube viewers.
He duly performed it on the night that Britain was supposed to have left the EU last week. It wasn’t vented in frothing fury – just with a rather British spirit of undefeated eccentricity. The mood was one of a knees-up in a pub about to be raided for the unguarded expression of ordinary opinion.
The overarching conceit for the short set, offloading an album’s worth of gently outspoken and wittily provoking ditties, is that they collectively set out his stall for his utopian country – Libertaria, the national anthem of which we’re invited (but only on a voluntary basis) to sing at the start (“Leave us alone, let a thousand flowers bloom”). The music for that one? A steal from the Russian national anthem; all kinds of other playful borrowing ensues.
There’s a genius touch of Gilbert and Sullivan to some of the rhyming. “It’s an administrative mire – overworked and tired, the staff are inundated… but mention a thing about shortcomings and you’re excommunicated” – he faux cheeky-cheerily intones like a latterday George Formby in a devil’s advocate critique of the NHS. Funk music helps lambast crony capitalism and rap is employed to assail modern blandness. Nigel Farage is the subject of a smoochy American love song.
If you prefer a sleek, sardonic, Lefty comedian, please ask for one at the Museum of Comedy’s sister venue Leicester Square Theatre. Yet in its very modest, ramshackle way this freethinking show – getting the shortest of runs after trialling in Edinburgh this summer – is the one that gets my vote.