You could watch John Kearns’ act for a long time before thinking of Van Gogh. But that’s the parallel Kearns invites in The Varnishing Days, which combines art appreciation, daydreaming and tales of new parenthood. Kearns has enjoyed a recent brush with breakout success via Taskmaster and the Comedy Central panel show Guessable? and tonight this oddball act wonders aloud whether to make his compromises with the mainstream. But as with Dutch painters, so with south London comedians: art is about doing what you want, not what others tell you. And so Kearns dons his trademark tonsure wig and false teeth, and delivers the finest, and not at all compromised, set of his career so far.
Not that it’s as niche as he affects: there’s plenty for everyone to enjoy, if rarely in the trad standup manner. Kearns is as much wistful philosopher of the everyday as comic. He’s got great observational material in his locker – as he enjoys pointing out, the bin bag routine is a banker. But more often, the humour is in Kearns’ marvelling at some humdrum domestic detail, or elevating us (like Raymond Briggs’ Snowman, subject of a masterful audience interaction tonight) into a flight of fancy on the lives he, and his newborn son, might one day lead.
The trick is, by force of tinpot lyricism and a personality prone to unlikely awe, to reframe banality as wonderment. A bland remark by TV’s Jermaine Jenas about an ageing tortoise? Kearns reels at its implications. A Marco Pierre White video about boiling spuds? Our host builds upon it a soulful reverie about running his own family restaurant. The show might be structured around a day’s childcare, ministering to his one-year-old boy. (“Imagine being one!”) But away from the bum wiping, Kearns’ mind lifts up and away, into Van Gogh’s Starry Night and beyond.
“He painted that from the window of his asylum,” Kearns tells us, “and now you can buy it in Lego. What a world!” And what a show, from this unlike-anyone-else poet of the beautiful banal, his hands steeped in baby poo, his gaze fixed on the stars.
