Jamali Maddix: Chickens Come Home to Roost

It’s a brave soul who pops out for a comfort break during Jamali Maddix’s show. The already award-laden Londoner has gotten some useful TV work over the last year, but a lame panel show really can’t prepare you for Maddix live. He doesn’t so much work the crowd as work them over, like the old man who attacks him with a brick during one of the many gasp-inducing sections of this remarkable debut hour.

Maddix is quite spectacularly rude to his paying public, but pretty much everyone—just about—revels in it. Interestingly, he doesn’t actually pick on those awkward creep-outers, the stray gazelles – too weak a target. This is the noble art of affable aggression, perfectly pitched. Shame about the show title, but you can’t have everything.

Chickens Come Home to Roost covers a hefty range of hot-button topics, much of it race related, and most of it actively involving his audience. This isn’t so much a show as a caustic seminar, and his blunt enquiries—“what about you, you old fuck, did you vote Tory?”—are impossible to swerve. Forget panel shows, they should let him do the political interviews on Newsnight.

Which is not to suggest that the show lacks content. Maddix is a fabulous storyteller, and doesn’t hold back here either: there are enough revelations to thematically fuel several shows for lesser comics. He does thoughtful too, during the traditional give-the-audience-a-breather section late on, though we hardly need it. This is one of those shows you could happily watch—or actively experience—for hours.