Comedy review: Chris Addison

Published on Friday 27 March 2009 23:08

**** OLD FRUITMARKET, GLASGOW

I USUALLY try to stay away from personal remarks, but my first thought when Chris Addison walked out on stage was: "Good grief, that man is thin."

After a couple of hours onstage I understood why. Addison is a human firecracker, fizzing with energy and ideas.

He jitters around the stage, leaping from subject to subject and slipping in and out of outrageously and deliberately off-kilter impressions of people and things, from the Glasgow Underground to the Queen Mother.

He is slightly all over the place tonight – but I love the fact that he keeps making himself giggle so much he folds in half like a Swiss army knife. "I've got to that stage in my career when I'm mostly entertaining myself," he says.

Addison is well known as a compere and there are times in the first half when things are too compere-ish.

It's all a bit too heavy on the geographical observations about Glaswegian students and Scots in general.

But he gets up to speed in the second half, sending up the banking crisis, ranting about the tabloidisation of television news and questioning the concept of democracy.

He's at his best with this sort of mischievous liberalism and it whets your appetite for more.

Sadly, at the end of two hours Addison checks his watch and howls: "I haven't talked about half the things I meant to."

In a way it is a shame, but it just makes me want to go back and see him again.