Tim Key - Megadate
King of awkward absurdism, Tim Key (self-proclaimed “Funjineer”) circled the audience in a way that was somehow both ridiculous and predatory, putting you in mind of a wounded coyote. As the final cries to take our seats sounded, he did a final lap of the seats and mooched on stage, shuffled about, looked shifty, then shuffled off again.
The lights dimmed, and he swept up to the mic in Reeboks and a crumpled broke salesman suit. After throwing down a carrier bag of beer cans, he proceeded to spray beer foam over the front row and stuff the can under his armpit in a bid to stem the frothing.
“I swallowed a pip,” he told us, “I swallowed a pip and a tree grew inside me. Worst-case scenario, really.” If we thought he was going to ramp up to the wacky, get us to develop a tolerance before hitting us with the heavy stuff, we were sorely mistaken.
Absent-mindedly, he flipped through a deck of cards and read spasmodic ludicrous and screwy poems slammed down firmly at the mid-point between idyllic beauty and the irrepressibly vulgar. He swept through jaw-spasmingly funny riffs about his mum eating a 900g block of cheddar in the shadows whilst using a single water biscuit as a dairy delivery system, as well as turning a Madame Tussauds waxwork of Mariah Carey into a human candle, or why perhaps it’s better advised not to sneeze your heart onto your plate during a first date (or any date for that matter).
The show was peppered with black and white film reel clips, halfway between Laurel and Hardy and La Jetée, each with its own deliciously dark punch-line. They were given no introduction or explanation by Key, who waltzed off during the screening interjections then popped back up and carried on as if nothing had happened. Some monochrome highlights featured him wearing a white hard-hat telling a nonchalant mourner that he’d faked his own death, whilst another saw him on a rooftop shaving his beard only to accept a menthol Vogue from a stranger and disappear down a trash chute.
I’ve never laughed until I’ve winded myself before, but Tim Key made it happen. Shaman of whimsy, the Funjineer (it’ll catch on, give it time) delivered a masterclass in the bonkers, batshit and frankly bewildering, all mixing together to create the perfect fusion of abstraction and the cutting that is sorely missing from the comedy circuit.
“I had a dream that the fibres of my jumper were filled with small men, so tiny they are almost imperceptible to the human eye. And in their jumpers are little men also almost imperceptible, and in their jumpers and in theirs and so it went, infinite times. Just imagine finishing your set with that piece of material.”
And he did.
