Comedy review: Henning Wehn, Oran More, Glasgow

ONE of the difficulties every comic must encounter is how to start their show. When you’re a German stand-up whose act consists mainly of playing around with national stereotypes, taking to the stage a couple of minutes late hands you an open goal of gags about Teutonic efficiency versus British tardiness.

Henning Wehn

Oran More, Glasgow

***

A swift introductory reference to being in a bunker for this “rally” and the tone is firmly set for almost two hours of Henning Wehn’s second-language shtick.

Having worked the UK circuit for ten years now, he feels thoroughly assimilated into his new homeland, though a flimsy grasp on cockney rhyming slang has resulted in a few awkward moments.

But it’s Wehn’s wide-eyed innocence that helps him get away with some material that others wouldn’t even dare broaching round these parts: the room positively clenched when he took on the poisoned goblet of fire that is football sectarianism but loosened when he delivered his findings based on out-dated thinking and his own confusion about whose side he should be on.

While his first section putters along amiably enough with awful sausage puns, predictable digs at the Royal Family, and routines about Germany consistently bailing out the rest of Europe, he really motors in the second half. There, Wehn’s material shifts from the sharp digging at chauvinistic attitudes (his own and of others) and on to broader issues of tax avoidance and the downside of charity.

It’s perhaps an admission that even the most avid of Germanophiles in his crowd can take only so much chat about wars and wurst.