2010 Edinburgh Fringe

Tim Vine review

Tim Vine: The Joke-amotive. Tim Vine. Copyright: BBC

The poster for Tim Vine's current show pretty much tells you everything you need to know about it. Like the poster, the show contains dubious punning, immense velocity, and a man who sometimes seems to be hanging on for dear life as his own jokes try to get away from him.

Apart from a few short songs scattered around the hour, Tim Vine does not stop telling you things that are funny. There's no story here, no tale of an adversity overcome or a lifelong ambition fulfilled, there is the pared-down surrealism of a world that contains only jokes: brief scenes in which he is a psychiatrist, or he goes into a shop, or he's at the airport, and each of these brief interactions might contain a string of three or four gags, but then that conceit is gone to be replaced by another in which he is walking down the street with a dog or a bicycle, or something else that you can hang some new jokes on. Or he rummages in his bag of stuff to produce props that have been lovingly crafted or just bashed together for a single line and a single effect, and then they're gone as well.

It must be exhausting for him. Certainly it's exhausting for the audience, who don't know whether to laugh, groan or clap the sometimes extremely daft, sometimes very clever wordplay. Early on in the show someone applauds a particularly choice pun and Vine says "don't start that, you'll wear yourself out". He's not wrong (you might want to limber up your face before you go or you'll pull something). Despite all this, he never looks less than delighted with the whole event, and neither does the audience.


Tim Vine: The Joke-amotive listing

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