© 2020 – 2024 AEA3 WEB | AEAƎ United Kingdom News
AEA3 WEB | AEAƎ United Kingdom News
Image default
News

Joe Thomas: the post-Inbetweeners comedown

The ex-Inbetweener’s new work-in-progress standup show, about breaking beyond being typecast, has a self-lacerating character

The maladroit comic parlaying their anxiety into humour is as old as standup itself. But it’s a highwire act: other people’s neuroses can be funny, or – one wrong step – troubling instead. Is it unfair to expect sure-footedness from Trying Not to Panic, the standup debut of ex-Inbetweener Joe Thomas? Perhaps – it’s a work-in-progress after all, like so many of the offerings on this year’s Edinburgh not-quite-the-fringe. Comedians have had few opportunities to hone their shows, or their craft, over the past 18 months. It’s not been the optimum period in which to launch a new set, much less a new standup career. (A difficulty with which fellow Inbetweener Simon Bird has also wrestled.)

So: the good news is that this is a striking debut from Thomas, here to lament his career stasis and how the Channel 4 sitcom for ever defines him in the public perception. And the less good news? Well, I’m not sure the show’s humour is sufficiently buoyant – yet – to lift audiences above Thomas’s pit of despair. Some of the gags are awfully cynical, and the self-lacerating character of the comedy left me uncertain whether to laugh with Thomas, or worry for him.

Continue reading…

Related posts

Automated UK welfare system needs more human contact, ministers warned

AEA3

Champions League final: Liverpool v Real Madrid – live!

AEA3

Foreign Office is ‘complicit in British man’s Somalia torture’

AEA3