Tonight, says Jermaine Fowler, “I’m just prepping stuff for my next standup film.” It’s an underwhelming opening from the Coming 2 America star – whose UK debut is not being sold as a work-in-progress. Sure enough, Fowler duly lingers close to his little red notebook for much of the hour, reminding himself whether the next bit is about his jailbird twin, his rescue hamsters, or the time he spent half an hour on Whoopi Goldberg’s space-age toilet.
That doesn’t prevent the 33-year-old delivering a very genial set: he’s a warm and engaging presence, and develops an open, easy rapport with his mouthy late-night crowd. But this is a standup appearance still developing into a coherent show. Broadly, it traces Fowler’s family background, growing up poor, his teenage parents variously into Christianity, dating strippers and homemade porn. There’s the raw material here for a rewarding narrative about Fowler’s journey out of that world, and its counterpoints in the lives of those he left behind – or, in the case of a long-lost sister, never knew. But for now, it’s coming at us in fragments rather than a structured whole.
