Phill Jupitus is Porky the Poet in Zeitgeist Limbo

Keats, Yeats, Shelley and Auden can all rest easy. The pantheon of great poets will not need to be extended to make room for Phill Jupitus. Nor would he want it to be. His punkish, puckish poetry is much more at home in a mosh-pit with Spike Milligan and Ogden Nash, where clickety-clack rhythms carry the poems to their inevitable rhyming punchlines.

The show is irreverent from the start. It is listed under the spoken word section in the Fringe programme and credits Jupitus’s poetic alter-ego, Porky, as the main act. All of which is misleading.

This is Jupitus’s gig. A comedian by trade, he was always going err towards his natural, humorous temperament. Look elsewhere for a Steve Martin line in the sand between comedy and art.

His multifarious cultural interests, popular and otherwise, are channelled into verse. We get poems about when music fans grow up (The Fat Mods), an intense invective about Jeremy Clarkson having sex with cars (Jeremy Car-Fucker), and a neat answer to a poetry question no one asked (Why William Blake Only Wrote One Poem About Tigers – too few words rhyme with ‘tiger’).

Jupitus is a talented, focused wordsmith and seems to be having a ball. His subjects may be slight—he wisely leaves pondering Greek pottery to other dead white guys—but it is a timely reminder why the shared love of words and their multiple meanings makes poetry and comedy harmonious bedfellows.