There was a time when comedians weren’t just about the jokes, they were about the crooning, too. I saw Ken Dodd shows back in the day where he broke up the tattifilarious nonsense with sentimental ballads and wartime songs. Can you imagine a 21st-century comic doing anything so uncool? Reader, you no longer have to – as one of the coolest comedians in the world wings his way to London with a show as much about the heartfelt chanson as the layers-of-ironic millennial bantz.
The man in question is John Early, scene-stealing camp superstar of the HBO comedy-thriller Search Party, and sidekick to another whip-smart standup brain, Kate Berlant. Like Berlant – and like Catherine Cohen, Bo Burnham or the UK’s own Leo Reich – Early’s work fashions the navel-gazing, always-online, identity-as-performance spiritual anomie of his generation into outrageous comedy. Or at least, he does in his screen work. Onstage, it’s a bit different, and includes straight-bat performances of pop/rock standards with the backing of six-piece band the Lemon Squares. “In the beginning,” he says, “I just felt, ‘wouldn’t this be groovier if I did this with a full band? Wouldn’t it be fun to do a Britney Spears song with a 70s-inflected arrangement?’”
