Many is the standup show where – well-crafted hours, be damned! – I’ve happily been steamrolled by force of personality alone. That will be some audiences’ experience of Miami comic and broadcaster Michelle Collins’ set tonight. But it’s not mine.
Collins is a huge presence, no doubt, a naturally funny and convivial host for this 70 minutes of shops chat, family home videos and the odd song about her love life. But unless you’re already a fan of this self-described “media personality”, as several present seem to be, the material seems scandalously thin.
I hold my hands up: the Venn diagram of my taste and Collins’ #content – online cat videos; paeans to her favourite shops; self-indulgent clips of her mum on a cruise – has slender overlap. She starts with loads of no-filter energy, locking on to a fellow Netherlands resident in the crowd and bantering about the TK Maxx store in The Hague. Her skittish sense of fun is endearing, and the rapid switches from this subject to that audio-visual via another nugget of hot gossip keeps the show on its toes.
But you soon start noticing the insubstantiality of Collins’ material. A slide of Shrek with his dick out, anyone? An anecdote about being in the returns queue at Zara, in which even Collins admits (“it’s not a laugh story”) nothing funny happens? Numerous lifeless clips from a TV show called My Big Fat Pet Makeover? Apparently, Collins’ mother, Judy, is a staple of her media output – but when Collins fille starts screening videos of Mum doing nothing interesting on various forms of transport, I begin to long for a form of transport to spirit me out of the theatre.
She raises some laughs along the way, of course – with a slide show of male dating profiles, say, or with a routine about the inadequacy of European tampons. But any momentum built is soon dissipated – most terminally with her final a cappella song, an autobiographical Les Mis rehash whose words, and indeed tune, she cheerfully fumbles. There’s lovable chutzpah in spades here – but that only takes us so far.
At Soho theatre, London, until 29 June
