Josh Glanc’s shows have grown increasingly abstract and thematically untethered over time, making them endearingly daft above all else. Family Man once again finds the Australian playfully exploring masculinity and vulnerability to an extent, with plenty of music, good-natured, unthreatening audience participation and leftfield shaggy dog stories.
With its repeated, supposed restarts and premature endings, reprises and variations on a core of original songs, there’s the faintest suggestion of structural cleverness. Yet only superficially, it’s really just a hodge-podge of silly set-pieces, and no less appealing for that.
Nominated for the Edinburgh Comedy Award, the show suffers a bit on tour from the greatest hits, older material that Glanc pre-empts it with in the first half. The opening skit, in which he inducts members of the crowd into miming a familiar tune is a light-hearted, gentle introduction to the levels of participation required of them.
His alternative, first person history of Euro pop chart-toppers Aqua is winningly absurd, recalling their disposable tosh with a deluded self-reverence usually reserved for chin-stroking documentaries about The Beatles or Bob Dylan. Not especially sneery, it’s a good example of just how far Glanc will commit to stretching throwaway gags into recurring bits, sustaining the sketch way beyond what it ought to have a right to.
Then there’s delightful, Americana-flavoured buffoonery of his song I Drive A Truck, a weirdly compelling, schizophrenic collision of strident butch heteronormativism and upbeat camp that can only end one way.
Yet outside the context of the Fringe, all this is quite a bold, destabilising opening for an audience to get onboard with cold. And combined with the odd technical snafu and Glanc’s mildly panicked insecurity about how he’s going down on his debut Glasgow visit, he doesn’t truly have the crowd’s confidence, and he knows it, which is transmitted and perpetuated in a feedback loop. The appreciation of him doing something a bit different and risky only carries him so far.
Fortunately, more or less all of these reservations are banished with the start of the show proper after the interval, with Glanc’s freshly acquired crop top and hairy midriff on display projecting supreme clown confidence. Musing on the creative feeling of being In The Zone, the show has a lovely, lyrical ebb and flow to it, supported by a battery of sound and light cues and his practised knack of swiftly, effectively conveying to the volunteers that he drags up on stage exactly what he requires from them.
Purporting to transfer energy from one crowd member via himself to another, with a preacher’s bombast, it’s communal and almost convincing, while Family Man’s oft-repeated title track is pure whimsicality. And there’s a touch of pathos in a ditty about a young man meeting his older self. Purporting to be something deeper, more connected, it’s really all just lively nonsense.
A moustachioed goofball with an overt romantic streak, Glanc beautifully sends up the cliches of star-crossed lovers in the show’s best running gag, a song recalling how he met his wife that repeatedly flips into extremity and underlying darkness. Funny in the repetition and variation, crucially each run out simultaneously also hinges on some great stand-alone rug pulls in their own right.
Self-consciously straining to set himself apart from more conventional comedy, he’s respectful in his invocations of Michael McIntyre and Jerry Seinfeld yet namechecks them to pursue a more ambitious, unpredictable and trickier path, constantly messing about with storytelling form. I reckon Glanc has had stronger, more consistent shows. But maybe not one that’s so fully distilled his comic essence.
Tours until 10 August 2025 | Image: Contributed
The Reviews Hub Score
Lively whimsical daftness
