Tim Vine: The Joke-amotive

Tim Vine: The Joke-amotive *****

To amuse myself, I counted the number of jokes in this show. Vine, whose brother is a radio presenter and whose mother is called Di (a little-known fact, though who knows what line Tim’s Dad proposed to her with), is the duke of the one-liner and proved it tonight, though one disgusted (and disgusting) chap walked out with a muffled cry. With his catchphrase “cue the music PLEASE!”, bad-dad dancing steps, amusing songs and torch-related visuals puns (“is it a banana, or is it a shoe?...It’s a torch.”) work brilliantly in his hands. One skit involved cutting a graph and smelling it – freshly-cut graph brought a laugh. One in five were groaners, but he took them in good grace, and I particularly liked his bag of tricks in which he pulled out various contraptions like his family tree (Me-Mum-Dad-Mum-Dad etc etc). On telling an audience member to take an envelope with a joke in it to the seventh row, then calling him back to the second row, he tossed the line “you’ve taken that joke too far” into the set. Cue more laughter, and a smile hurting my face. You’d not want to be stuck with this shtick forever, but for an hour you feel like all the problems in the world are gone.

How many laughs? 299, plus one last one in which he illuminated a hidden torch on his guitar. A laugh every twelve seconds is pretty good going, and I’d recommend Vine to the bitterest Scrooge.

Tim Vine: The Joke-amotive

Pleasance Courtyard
20:43, 5-29 Aug