Stevie Martin: Clout – The Stand, Glasgow

By any metric, Stevie Martin has been exceptionally successful at parlaying the “clout” she’s amassed online since the Covid pandemic into a more traditional and commercial comedy career. The recent extension of this tour follows fast upon her television appearances on Taskmaster and Mitchell and Webb Are Not Helping, even as her voiceover grows ever more familiar on adverts.

Consistently tricksy and deconstructing as it is though, Clout is pitched as coming from insecurity about her comedy chops, her return to the live arena for the first time since her 2019 show beset by trepidation, despite her having found a strong, goofily irreverent voice and angsty Millennial sensibility in the interim.

Slickly performed and awash with accompanying screen and sound cues, if a little stuck on rails and with rather too many references to how gags went down elsewhere on the tour to seem truly in the moment, there’s nevertheless a compelling sense of the polished framed as nervy experiment, carried on Martin’s upbeat good humour and commitment to silliness.

Contrasting the hot lights immediacy of live stand-up with the clinical but arbitrary algorithms and analytics of her online fame, she spoofingly introduces aspects of the latter into the former. And she messes about with ideas of originality, lamenting tech-driven constrictions upon her creativity while pithily dismissing Shakespeare as having just a few plots he endlessly rehashed.

Martin is upfront about her unwillingness to put too much of herself into her stand-up, affecting a humdrum life spent too much on her phone. Similarly, her inability to play with narrative tension in the manner of master storytellers, her attention span wired to a snappier seeking of dopamine hit. In both regards though, she endears with her honesty while undermining this self-deprecation, weaving a singular narrative that displays her canny understanding of both on and offline humour.

She is acutely aware that her biggest viral hit, a brief clip of her removing her mouth retainer in a restaurant, viewed by more than 20 million people, was something of a fluke, displaying little wit or craft. And just as much of the fool’s errand in trying to reproduce that happy accident in a bid for acclaim or fame.

The visual aspects of the show are dense with throwaway daftness and a mushrooming number of call-backs by the end, keeping it propelled at a fair old clip, while dismissing any lingering notions that Martin is an act who won’t rush to undercut any glimmer of seriousness or deeper significance.

The suggestion that all this propensity for nonsense is a penance for her time as a journalist on a celebrity magazine feels a stretch. Still, it’s nice to get just a little more of a sense of her background, which is largely kept obscure.

Inventive, engaging and richly self-aware, Clout still feels a little contained, inhibited and tightly scripted for Martin’s live resurgence to be complete, her quirkiness restrained as she seeks to divest herself of those uncertainties about her performance skills. But there’s tremendous potential for her to really flourish in the future.