Russell Kane: Smokescreens and Castles

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Russell Kane was good last year. Clever, and not afraid to show it, he ran intellectual rings around many of his contemporaries, who lacked his store of half-remembered sociological and literary sources. But too often it felt a little artificial – disaffectedly intellectual for no sake other than its own. This year, Kane has ditched some of the act. He doesn’t seem driven to overegg his extraordinary perceptiveness with irrelevant bookishness; he’s learned that he can do subtlety as well as virtuoso verbosity.

In Smokescreens and Castles, Kane examines—and it is a thorough examination, rather than a series of observations—the way in which we build 'castles' of various sorts to hide or protect what we really feel. His by-now-familiar mine is his own family. But Kane digs not just for comedy, but astute and sensitive conclusions about a group of people he clearly cares deeply about – even his hard-man, diesel-guzzling, racist father. Taking his audience on a metaphorical tour around his ex-council house family castle—one of only three on his street to have taken up Thatcher’s right-to-buy—he grapples with the huge social upheaval of the ’80s and makes it touchingly personal.

Kane is an accomplished performer and a master of energising an audience. But what marks him out is a capacity for subtlety; an eye for authentic characterisation; an ear for kitchen sink drama. There are few comedians who can whip an audience into 59 minutes of laughter, before closing on a minute of whispered poignancy. This year, Kane isn’t good. He’s brilliant.