Comedy review: Bruce Morton, Glasgow Stand

AN ENJOYABLE if patchy show from the veteran Glaswegian comic, featuring something old, something new, a few (fine) gags borrowed (and attributed).

With more than 20 years in the business, Bruce Morton can occasionally seem jaded about stand-up. Yet even lamenting his career by comparison to George Clooney’s, he can still rally with a daft mental image.

What was especially compelling about tonight wasn’t the assured routine about him mounting a horse for the first time, or the obligatory comedian’s rectal exam. Both of these were tossed off with playful ease. So too was a new yet classic Morton anecdote about his youthful participation in a train robbery, his entire Cambuslang housing scheme stripping a consignment of lager dry. Related with rich detail, affectionate reminisce and just enough physical mania to convey the booze-fuelled bampottery of the incident, it had the additional frisson of confession. And it was this quality that made his accounts of tit-for-tat domestic strife all the more engaging, their rougher edges compensated for by smashing of homeware, cruelty and violent threats, not to mention the presence of his girlfriend in the crowd. A section berating Facebook users and cinema multiplex hyperbole never resonated, despite his protestations of being no middle-aged luddite. But there were some scampish callbacks to earlier jokes, lifting much of the material.

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He closed with his grandstanding self-appointment as El Presidente of the Greater Shawlands Republic, a left-wing manifesto for Glasgow’s south side that’s light-hearted, but barbed with animosity towards the likes of bus magnate Brian Souter.

Rating: ***

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