Has the advent of trauma-comedy been a boon to standup, broadening its emotional range? Or has it, as the sceptics argue, replaced tears of laughter with tears of sympathy? I’ll meet those sceptics halfway tonight: John Robins’ Howl is both more and less than a comedy show. It finds the 41-year-old in recovery from alcoholism but still wrestling with “the problem of myself”, and speaking candidly about both. There are as many passages of raw confessional as there are jokes. It’s less funny than Robins’ previous shows, because, more starkly than in the past, it depicts his high-anxiety antics as not (just) as a hoot, but a sickness too.
That can’t help but impede your laughter. On paper, Robins’ central routine in act one is comedy gold, as he overthinks to the point of psychological collapse the simple purchase of a slotted spoon. One can imagine Rhod Gilbert – or indeed previous versions of Robins – turning this into something uproariously manic and ridiculous. It’s amusing here too, as our host weighs up the shallow shape of one spoon (“based on the sort of palm you would present to a horse”) against the worrying cheapness of another. But it’s also sad: Robins emphasises the emotional truth of the episode, and of a life paralysed by anxiety, controlling impulses and resentments that could only be stilled, temporarily, by booze.
The second half finds Robins sober, calmer, and outlining the patterns of thinking he hopes will keep him that way. He’s trying to be grateful for Chiltern Railways carrying him to work every day, not furious at how overcrowded they are while doing so. (No prizes for guessing which part of that equation is funniest.) But if Robins’ biggest laughs come from the tormented soul he used to be – see the cripplingly self-conscious dialogue with his fiancee’s mum about mouldy pickles – he finds humour too in his new Zen(ish) philosophy, illustrated with reference to the unquenchable egos of Messrs Bezos, Zuckerberg and Musk. Both as standup and as a sermon on Robins’ salvation from a very dark place, Howl is unflinching, heartfelt and bleakly comic.
