The best gauge of a comedy show is how much your face hurts, how soon into the show it starts hurting, and how many involuntary snorts (and a bonus point if the first snort is in the first 10 minutes).
In the case of Harry Hill's new show Pedigree Fun, which stopped at the Lowry last night (Jan 22), the scores were: A lot, and I had to take my glasses off a few times; about five minutes; and about five or six (plus one bonus point).
It was an excellent start. The national treasure behind TV Burp, You've Been Framed ('15 years of free money!') and the host of Junior Bake Off has been touring this show since October last year, his first major tour since lockdown, and by this stage it's like a well oiled, if demented machine.
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It's the breadth he covers which is so dizzying. Where else would you get actual clowns on the loose in the crowd, hedgehogs, giant socks, pugs on motorbikes, making a robotics engineer called Dave dress as a baby elephant, old fashioned ventriloquist dummies vomiting shaving foam, old fashioned music hall style dance routines and Coleridge all in one place.
While his TV work these days manages the impossible task of being both funny and broad, the live shows have always pushed things to the edges, tempering the silliness and whimsy with a pleasing edge of darkness here and there.
There are gags about Savile, Yewtree-snared stars of the 70s, Bill Gates conspiracies, Hitler and Jeffrey Epstein. But then there's also a bit where he's trying and failing to get his microphone into the stand which has the audience in pieces. That he can makes these things co-exist in the same show is superbly impressive.
And all comics does callbacks now – where you plant references throughout a set and circle back to them later. Harry does callbacks to tours and performances he did years – in some cases decades – ago.
OK, some things don't quite land as they should. A slightly subdued Sunday night audience doesn't hurl themselves quite as fully as necessary into a recurring participation game where cakes, breads, people and animals are categorised into whether they're a classic 'tray bake' or a 'tear and share', a nod to the Bake Off, all to the tune to Grandstand.
It's still funny, but on the right night in the right place with the right audience, it might have been riotous. But nonetheless, Britain's very daftest man was an absolute delight.
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