Jarred Christmas: Let's Go MoFo

If there’s one thing Jarred Christmas loves more than comedy, it’s dance. So deep runs this love, in fact, that his new show fuses his standup routine with random bursts of the stuff, with some pretty serious shapes being thrown in between anecdotes about World War II and fatherhood. His set may not be wildly outlandish, but it does have the occasional element of surprise, and this is not to be underestimated.

Christmas covers reasonably safe ground: his “sexy” Kiwi accent, life with two young children and the early days of courtship between his grandparents. This isn’t earth shatteringly new territory, but for the most part it works, particularly the material centring on his own familial life. Revealing his criteria for the perfect mate (“someone who eats cheeseburgers and can protect me in a fight”) and a distaste for waxed men, Christmas is engaging in his vitriol. Where things slow down, though, are during the repeated anecdotes about WWII, which interrupt an otherwise linear narrative. The links made between present and past feel tenuous at times, and this hinders the pace of what is otherwise an incredibly energetic set.

A gag (literally) about accidentally fellating an Irish setter as a teen soon sees the laughs rolling back in, and the finale is undeniably amongst the greatest to ever grace the Fringe (just make sure you’re sitting in the front two rows). Christmas is well on par with a number of his comic contemporaries, and a few more years on the circuit should see him receiving the acclaim he deserves.