Jack Whitehall is a stand-up comedian, actor, and appears on that travel series where he tries to embarrass his dad. He’s currently warming up for his next big tour with a smaller scale tour with the premise being that he’s still working on his material and that he’ll use feedback from these smaller shows to iron out what should go on the big show.
Despite this premise setting the stage for a rough around the edges show, the show that we saw at the New Theatre in Oxford was great. There were no obvious signs of wonky bits, no notebook to hand and if I hadn’t known it was a work in progress show I would have happily accepted that it was the real deal.
Jack Whitehall is well known from his past acting and travel series work, and if I were to say one small criticism of the show is that he sometimes gave me the sense that he expects everyone will already know about the antics of his parents, and in particular his father. Truth is, whilst I do know his travel show, I have only seen a couple of episodes of it, so feel he could have done a bit more to establish the characters of his parents in a way that was fun for fans of his show, whilst also properly cluing in newcomers.
I’ll avoid spoiling the material Jack covers and won’t give jokes away from the show, but topics he covered included robots, safari, his relationship with his girlfriend, his unexpected appearance in a newspaper as well as a bunch more topics. There was some audience interaction, although I got the feeling that some of this was more the illusion of audience interaction as some of his jokes seemed to have the perfect response to things the audience said or looked he spotted on their faces. In reality I felt a lot of these were him just reacting as if the audience had given him the perfect reaction when he hadn’t.
The same can be said about when a stand-up makes a mistake in what they say and then gets a laugh for it. If they then have the perfect punchline to follow their vocal mishap, you can start to get suspicious that the original error was part of the show as well. No big deal, but almost felt as if he dipped in this well a couple too many times.
These thoughts are minor points in what was otherwise a really fun show that went between an hour and 90 minutes without an interval and included a few minutes of a warmup comedian who went on first. It was good to see that Jack included a fair amount of local references which went down well with the crowd, and it would be interesting to see how some of these moments would be adapted to other locations the show is on tour to.
I should imagine that each show he does on this warm up tour have sections that evolve or he tries out exclusively in each location of the tour. This did feel a near finished show that certainly will get better, but went beyond what I expected for a warm up show. The jokes pretty much all landed well, and whilst not the best stand-up show I’ve ever seen I can imagine when the show returns in it’s finished form it’ll be something quite special.
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