Ha! Milton Jones
If a comparison is needed then imagine the puns of Tim Vine, the lunacy of Spencer Jones, the relentlessness of Gary Delaney, and the sight gags of the late, great Tommy Cooper.
artist
A fair few years ago I caught Milton Jones do his thing in a tiny tent at Guilfest - he was the comedy sorbet that eased the transition from Mungo Jerry to Hawkwind. A jobbing comedian at the time, he told a joke I can't now remember about a homeless person and a trampoline, elicited chuckles rather than belly laughs and had a voice that reminded me of Matt Berry. His sonorous baritone still reminds me of Berry, but these days the comparison is as likely to be made the other way round. Quite when Jones became a big enough draw to fill the cavernous space of the Epic Studios, and with a hefty price tag attached to boot, is a mystery. He seems to have sneaked up on the rails, his frequent TV appearances elevating him to big ticket status while no one was looking. His live act remains an uncompromising mix of puns, non sequitur, call backs and absurd props, so perhaps it's the audience that has changed. Perhaps in these challenging times we need, more than anything, a bit of harmless silliness. It's certainly what we got, and judging by the rapturous reception, what the crowd was expecting.
All of which left support act Tal Davies with a challenging start to the evening. She faced that challenge head on, opening with the declaration that, having come along for an evening of clever word play we should brace ourselves for 20 mins of a Brummie accented, leopard skin wearing, lesbian with a soft spot for stick insects. She certainly struck up a contrasting tone, with confessional domestic anecdotes involving her Nan's whisky mouth spray, emergency gravy granules and jamming cheese into shopping trolleys. Not everything landed as she might have hoped, but by the end of her brief set she had won over a diffident crowd with a combination of self-depreciation and winning charm.
Milton Jones is a man that ploughs his own furrow. If a comparison is needed then imagine the puns of Tim Vine, interspersed with the surreal lunacy of Spencer Jones, though as he is arguably better known than either, that's less than helpful. He fires off one-liners with the relentlessness of Gary Delaney, but is equally content to draw out a sight gag to breaking point that brings to my mind the late, great Tommy Cooper. His current show hints at what to expect in the title Ha! Milton, the central conceit being his attempt to construct a musical loosely based on his ancestor. It's little more than a hook to hang an exhaustive, and exhausting, string of gags, both verbal and visual, which focus as much on quantity than quality.
I very much doubt it elicited the “cease and desist” order supposedly issued by the more famous musical, but it's hard to know. Did the producers of Hamilton really did take exception to his appropriation of their title? Were we supposed to anticipate certain punch lines, and did he really did accidentally repeat himself? All of the above added to the merriment of the evening, but given the tight choreography needed to match the back projections, sound effects and big reveals, I suspect even the most obvious stumble was actually part of a master plan. When we chuckled good naturedly at his “mistake” or groaned knowingly when he only got as far as Angle A, I think we were being played, and hats off to him for pulling it off. As the trip wire set for an unsuspecting audience member proved in his extended encore, he was actually in full control of the evening's trajectory, however shambolic it might have superficially appeared. After all, as he said, standing at the bow of a makeshift ship fashioned from a chair while wearing a giant samosa as a hat, this is his job.
