The fashion is for fringe newcomers to deliver solo shows all about themselves: potted autobiographies big on identity and self-assertion. By the end of Ikechukwu Ufomadu’s debut, by contrast, we haven’t the faintest idea who he is. Amusements is performed in character as “an old-school entertainment type”, as he’s described it. The voice of chuckling, patrician mid-century American entertainment. The joke, which you’ll spend the show both amused by and trying to pin down, explores the gap between the supposed authority of that stately, avuncular persona and the frictionless superficiality of its every utterance.
It’s a confidence trick of a show: anti-comedy concealing itself in a tuxedo and the voice of JFK. “Just another of my signature jokes there,” Ufomadu will twinkle, “with a little sprinkling of humour on top.” But the joke is often how thin the jokes are (“don’t waste your 20s being between the ages of 20 and 29”), and how far between: Ufomadu enunciates every word like Orson Welles chewing Japanese whisky.
