Jason Cook: The Search for Happiness

"We’ve got a reviewer from Fest in tonight, folks. Where is he?"

After a series of false starts I finally, at the third time of asking, make it to Jason Cook. "Here," I sheepishly croak from the back row, as what feels like every eye in the sell-out crowd turns on me. "Glad you made it, son. It’s a great show."

And he’s not far wrong. Friendly, demonstrative and genuinely funny, right from the get-go Cook forges a warm bond with the audience that serves to heighten, rather than distract from, his rich seam of comic musings on everything from being a Geordie to middle-class dinner parties.

Ostensibly a show about satisfaction, pleasure, contentment, love and intense joy—the five keys to happiness that provide the show’s loose architecture—The Search for Happiness is less a definitive quest and more an extended, gag-filled meander. Along the way we meet a bigoted taxi driver, Cook’s newborn baby and his pleasingly off-the-wall mum, who, as Mohammad Al-Fayed discovered, has a penchant for pretending to know famous people.

Cook has a talent for weaving early audience interactions through his set without picking on people – as I quickly discover. "See that great narrative thread? I’d put that in your review," he says, then checks himself. "I’m committing career suicide right now, ladies and gentlemen."

He smiles, the audience laughs. We all know nothing could be further from the truth.