In an era of clinical, careerist stand-up, when plenty of comedians talk openly about being teetotal and having personal trainers, Tony Carroll recalls some of the overweight North-Western club comics of yore, enabled by their late-night lifestyle.
Less absurdist than Johnny Vegas, the genial Scouser nevertheless shares Vegas’ vulnerability and fatalistic appetite for self-destruction, the morning after self-recrimination of the more established act’s wilder years.
Hard-living catches up with everyone eventually. And while Carroll talks openly about his rapacious drug use and negotiations with prostitutes, while referencing his size in every routine, at 33 he appreciates that he’s rolling the dice with his health. Even masturbation has become a contorted effort.
Compellingly though, while his anecdotes are the cautionary tales of a weak-willed and often pathetic and naïve man, he’s not asking for sympathy. Raving all night in Ibiza or on an industrial estate on the outskirts of Liverpool, he’s always been a party animal. And he hasn’t really turned any corners or straightened himself out.
Packing out The Stand on a Monday night, no doubt as a result of the viral stories he shares on the Hot Water comedy club’s podcast, his debut UK tour feels like a chance to catch a comet plummeting to the ground, of debauchery in progress.
There’s a thrilling quality to that, the appeal of hearing where his foolhardy, chemically-fuelled brain has propelled him.
Despite the ‘hey baby!” refrain with which he supposedly greets women, he avoids sleaziness in the main, thanks in part to his ongoing juvenility, those unthreatening, oversized infant looks and an admission that he’s currently sleeping on his dad’s sofa.
When he imagines his future life with a girl he’s taken a shine to, naturally working at the counter of a popular High Street bakery, his vision of them at the Eiffel Tower is romantic despite the adolescent cliches. As a young teenager, he employed Chat Roulette to confound and catfish horny older men, neutering its predatory aspects.
And while he admits to texting an escort site, and gives little consideration to the feelings of the woman he’s ordered for company, his more pressing appetites prevent him completing the transaction. Even trying to give himself the last word in a row with which he closes the show, he (rather bizarrely) escalates it into a sadistic sex scenario, with himself rather clumsily framed as the victim.
So his material has a real double-edged aspect. There’s no moralising or learning from his misadventures and precious little social context, which is refreshing and direct, very much the tales of the funniest guy down the pub whose fleeting triumphs and lingering disasters you enjoy vicariously while at the same time thanking God that you’re not him.
Over an hour or so though, the sheer juggernaut of him trying and failing to satisfy his baser lusts and simply get out of his head feels like it might benefit from more self-reflection and analysis. And the undeniably mesmerising quality of his tales are let-down by limp or contrived punchlines, the conclusion never as fun as the ride.
Still, he’s a mercurial storyteller, larger than life in all respects. And so far, seemingly indestructible.
Runs until 6 February 2025 | Image: Contributed