It’s quite the project, converting what Jordan Brookes does on stage – experimental, unstable, disconcerting – into something that would “work on Live at the Apollo”. But that’s Brookes’s stated ambition with This Is Just What Happens, his first show since the award-winning I’ve Got Nothing, three summers ago. His weirder excesses are reined in here, in what – apart from the usual formal trickery – is at least recognisable as standup. But let’s not get carried away: this remains comedy quarried from the darker subsoil of a disturbed soul, delivered by a man whose warmest smile still stirs a tincture of unease. No one is mistaking Brookes for Russell Howard any time soon.
The show’s jagged spine is provided by a particular insult directed at Brookes in 2019. It’s nothing, he keeps telling himself: he’s over it now. But the whole show gives the lie to that, as the 36-year-old worries at the epithet in question, advertises to the audience – and himself – what a swell guy he is, then ends up re-enacting and chewing over the behaviour that pissed his critic off in the first place.
All of this takes us into intriguing territory, for Brookes and for humour. We’re closer than his previous work to confessional standup, but the nature of the confessions (the abuse he has received for being “ugly”; his love/hate relationship with promiscuity) is knotty and unresolved. He doesn’t, as other acts might, tidy the vulnerability away, but leaves it lingering on stage, tainting – or is it bolstering? – the laughter.
At the show’s least inspired, it mines those laughs from “shitting your pants” or (a Brookes staple, this) erotic relationships with family members. More often, he fashions the self-disclosure into nettlesome, off-colour comedy, like the act-out about his train journey to “Fucktown”, or the fracture staged between his self-justifying and his self-abnegating inner voices, between Brookes-as-victim and Brookes-as-perpetrator. That’s the territory of This Is Just What Happens, that existential space where we all must appraise whether we’re good people or not, with just our stubborn subjectivity, and all our baggage, to work with. Will Brookes’s soul-search break him into the mainstream? Maybe, maybe not – but it keeps his comedy as enthralling as ever.
• Jordan Brookes: This Is Just What Happens is at Soho theatre, London, until 11 June.
