Ange Lavoipierre, Newcastle Comedy Club, Feb 4
Even before you take your seat at the Newcastle Comedy Club you can sense the kind of nervy, edgy excitement that this city's nightlife has for so long lived without. Once you've climbed the stairs, visited the cosy bar and entered into the darkness it quickly dawns on you that you've somehow just scored a ticket to our newest and juiciest little secret.
Hiding away in this club is like nestling into the dusky intimacy of a speakeasy with stagelights. And like the wickedest secrets so often are, it looks like an innocent thing from a distance. But once you move closer, there's always more to the story. Within an arm's length from the stage itself there's likely to be a more intriguing truth for us all to face up to.
The best stand-up comedy shows seduce you into thinking about these truths without you even realising it. It's often a canny act of deception, made all the more magical by its simplicity. By the time we fall blindfolded from the cliff, at the end of a well-worn garden path, we're laughing too hard to care if we're hurt upon landing.
In her acclaimed show 99 Problems and Here is an Exhaustive List of Them, Sydney comedian Ange Lavoipierre talks a lot about gardens, without quite managing to lead you over the edge and out of one. Lurking amidst the foliage of her life, she assures us, are spiders intent on following her. She even appears at first instance dressed as one, in a kind of absurdist introduction to an otherwise literal anecdote about these pesky arachnids.
Lavoipierre is clearly a natural, brilliantly gifted and hilarious performer. She sparkles with quick wits and sly quips. She is pitch-perfect cynicism delivered with a wide-eyed smile. But it only takes a few minutes for her focus to bypass the audience and be swallowed by an all-too-familiar vortex of attention and energy.
I'm the first to concede that I'm old-fashioned, but when did the punchlines in live comedy routines start getting read from a smartphone? It's obviously daunting to stand before an audience for a whole hour while, on the strengths of your wits alone, you send them off the cliff edge into fits of laughter. But that's exactly why I was there - to marvel at somebody doing something daunting; something risky and outrageously courageous.
It's a large part of why stand-up comedy is so inherently thrilling. Anything can happen. It's just them and us. How will they manage to pull this show off with only their memory, a wooden stool and a glass of water?
The presence of a smartphone, as a barrier between the performer and their audience, rips the rug out from under the spectacle. It reduces the moment to feel like, well, any other moment of our everyday lives. If I wanted to have an exchange with another whilst one of us is distracted by a screen, I would have just stayed at home.
Even more peculiar is how Lavoipierre runs out of time whilst delivering some of her funniest material. The remainder of her 99 problems, after the one about the garden spiders, are quickly read from a worksheet in the dying minutes of the show. They are hilarious, as the truth of our common problems so often are, but it is almost as if we have to laugh before somebody turns all the lights on.
