Review: Comedy Garden: Stephen KA, Fin Taylor

A lot of comperes like to ask the front row questions as part of their routine. Carl Donnelly does – and he’s embracing rather than abusive in the way some comperes are, laughing with his victims rather than at them. What is less common is when the front row start asking questions back. But Donnelly takes it well, rolling with the wave like a good compere should. He has a good mastery of the art of ad libbing with a cold audience, with a pleasant openness and honesty in his extended exposition on how he avoids farting in front of his long-term girlfriend.

Fin Taylor is white, male and middle class. As a result, he feels very privileged. And that appears to be eating him up. His set therefore consists of an attack on the privileged white middle class. Now, many comedians can challenge an audience made up mainly of white middle-class people and get them laughing. We can all laugh at ourselves: it’s one of the tropes of British stand-up comedy.

But Fin is not simply identifying the flaws which we find embarrassingly ridiculous in ourselves – his is a bitter torrent of sneering which only really appeals to those who share his apparent self-loathing. His set reaches a nadir when he suggests that the high incidence of suicide amongst white men is simply because white males are so ‘privileged’ that there’s nothing else that can kill them. Like a lot of his act, this observation is greeted with uncomfortable silence from most of the audience.

Based on such narrow and myopic stereotyping, Taylor’s material goes down poorly partly because it feels discomfortingly like a torrent of racist abuse, even if the race he’s caricaturing and attacking is his own. There are weird echoes of Bernard Manning and Jim Davidson in the use of cheap contempt rather than genuine observation, and in his blithe assumption that his audience shares his prejudices.

And it is all the more annoying because somehow he manages to work in a few humblebrags along the way: we all now know that Taylor went to the country’s most expensive prep school and the fourth most expensive public school, and is now living on a trust fund established by his grandmother. And he hates it all. Essentially, Taylor’s act is Trustafarian posturing at its worst.

The advance publicity describes Stephen K Amos (pictured top) as “the maestro of feel-good comedy” with “an almost child-like joy and exuberance”. That’s not the comedian who appears in the Comedy Garden’s Apple Top tonight. That Stephen K Amos is angry and fierce (“I’ve dealt with my fear of swimming – by not fucking swimming!”), with a retro camp waspishness reminiscence of Lily Savage at her zenith.

He’s also very funny, ripping through material that riffed around all the things that younger members of the audience would not get. A joke about Singer sewing machines is carefully explained to the 22-year-old on the front row, the reference to ‘the totally tropical taste of Lilt’ dropped in for the oldsters to get on their own. And maybe his diatribe on how he disapproves of comedians who feel they can say anything they like in a rebellion against ‘being PC’ contained advice from an older, wiser comedian to the younger Fin Taylor – “if you can’t say anything nice, just shut the fuck up”.

Bristol Comedy Garden continues in Queen Square until Sunday, July 3. For more info and to book tickets, visit www.bristolcomedygarden.co.uk