Since breaking through as a double Edinburgh Comedy Award-nominee and landing a couple of television sitcoms, Spencer Jones’ act has continued evolving from abstract prop comedy to a more narrative-based variant, a niche of accessible, unthreatening clowning that very few performers have the skill or profile to pull-off.
His belated debut UK tour is perhaps testimony to why. The opening half of the show is a greatest hits compilation of some of his best bits of business, featuring countless anthropomorphic creatures brought to life from household items, looped nonsense snatches of songs and some surprise, physical reveals deploying his own body as a canvas, intense bursts of concentrated, if often inexplicable hilarity.
The arrested development and attention deficit of his persona, previously known as The Herbert, affords Jones a loveable, childlike goofiness, albeit one that’s periodically accompanied by a wry shake of the head, as he marvels that “I’m 48!” and still doing this for a living.
Beckoning up a volunteer to join in him in his misuse of a vibrating plate, for a scenario in which they’re hurtling along in a car, it’s beautifully and dumbly absurd, essentially powered by a juvenile compulsion to see how fast and for how long he can push the skit.
Meanwhile, whenever Jones assembles his rudimentary stage dummies out of mops and ping pong balls, it’s implied that he’s almost literally “making” friends, his wife and childrens’ indulgence of him perhaps starting to wane as time and his commitment to stupidity goes on, somewhat ratcheting up his pathos.
Certainly, it’s their perceptions of him as the family breadwinner and his mental health wobbles, subtextual in his early shows but now very much foregrounded, that truly persecute Jones and underpin the second half. Recounting the family’s move from London to Devon post-Covid and the existential ache and loneliness he’s enduring, he’s disarmingly open and unwilling to pretend that his troubles can be easily overcome.
Though never too long before a daft set-piece, an inspired Elvis impression or Freddie Mercury observation, the pace becomes more measured and the show is (relatively speaking) more thoughtful and less madcap. Failing to integrate into his new rural community, Jones loses further face and status in a stand-off with his recently acquired cockerel. Becoming his aggressive nemesis the bird, amusingly, stirs an escalating bloodlust within him.
More toxic masculinity is exhibited in a yokel-ish local character that Jones encounters and dips in and out of with recourse to some substantial false eyebrows and teeth, launching into over-the-top violence with apologetic afterthoughts, memorably conveyed in a series of demented, layered raps on his looper.
Although the show is touched with surreal madness throughout, Jones ties it together neatly with a well-plotted musical finale. However, for all that you feel for him in his mid-life crisis, the introspection and gloomier moments aren’t as punchy as his previous efforts dedicated to his relationship with his father, or even his less coherent and less linear shows have been. No faulting his ambition and daring though. Hopefully, he’ll be able to reconcile the abstract and the storytelling more effectively in the future once again.
Tours until 29 March 2025 | Image: Contributed
