The Daily Telegraph - Features
Winning whimsy with a subtle dash of darkness
Ross Noble
London Palladium, W1 ★★★★★
“When this show finishes, you get to go home,” Ross Noble told the audience at one point. “I have to live with this 24 hours a day.”
Noble’s three decades as a stand-up have been consistently and deliberately erratic. His performance rests on his ability to improvise hours of whimsy from the smallest detail in his eager audience. At the Palladium, an assistance dog in the front row took him on elaborate fantasies about herds of sheep chased between seats as a burly man in the balcony hurled paying punters onto their backs. Its spaniel breed created a riff on King Charles having an endoscopy while buglers play jazz standards.
“A lot of people are worried about their job being taken by AI,” he said solemnly. “I’m not.” He’s right, ChatGPT wouldn’t get anywhere near to his first half of perfectly timed improvisation, which is so disjointed, he asks people to stop messaging him to suggest he may have ADHD. “I have not been tested for ADHD,” he growled. “Of course, I’ve thought about it. But then, almost immediately, I think of something else.”
After the interval, Noble settled into a second half that felt like a collection of set pieces. And here’s where a topical thread that was only half visible in the first act became clearer. As he approaches 50, he retains his impish charm, but something is creeping in – perhaps it’s age or the surreal nature of our political discourse, but there’s a hint of defensiveness underpinning his forays into the fringes of the culture wars. He made references to cancellation a few times, although when approaching a riff on gender politics and trans issues, he hauled back with a dismissive “there’s too many hack comedians doing that”, before delivering a delightfully silly line about his trans sisters inventing the radio. He then posed as a heckling Terf and argued himself into a corner, concluding: “Perhaps this is a complex and nuanced issue that doesn’t lend itself to a punchline.”
He opened up into anecdotes and personal stories – or, at least, as personal as Noble is likely to get. There was a barbed destruction of the GB News presenter Neil Oliver – being mistaken for Oliver is the reason he trimmed his flowing locks – and scorn for Russell Brand. Stand-ups should never call themselves a wellness guru, he
He delivered a delightfully silly line about his trans sisters inventing the radio
sighed, “We are the least well people on the planet.” And he gets as close as he’s come to observational storytelling with an account of his wife’s anger at him joking about her frozen shoulder to the school-run mums – an elaborate fake story that they wholeheartedly believe. Trouble and strife, indeed.
There was a Q&A where he gently ribbed fans, but what could have been an anticlimax was saved when he segued into a mischievous piece of physical clowning, demonstrating a night of passion having to adapt to his iPhone shuffling to the Ghostbusters theme. Mostly pure Noble, then, but with a hint of something slightly darker.
No further performances
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