John Kearns: Shtick

John Kearns performs the majority of his act with a mouth full of false teeth and wearing an absurd wig. They're both a difficulty he sets himself and a concession to the comedian's need to put on a mask, to be something in particular for the audience. They also mesh neatly with his physical buffoonery, where jokes are smartly underpinned by measured gestures. His voice recalls Norman Wisdom, and his befuddled persona belongs in that tradition of clowning, where simple acts such as a well-timed push of the spectacles up the nose can garner the bigger laughs. Indeed, it is the swivelling of the eyes, the strangled, surprising yelps, and the fleeting gesticulations that hammer home the jokes in a show that looks like considerable labour.

He acknowledges he may not to be everyone's taste, but the bits that don't fly may be more to do with their lack of development than a reticent audience. A skit about Frankenstein is all set-up with little pay off, and it's perhaps time comedians moved on from jokes about Pingu. But there's a tender and hilarious sequence, involving audience participation, about an old couple in his local, which finds gold in the mundane. And there's a motif that opens and closes the show about trying to get on a train, whose poignancy suggests Kearns's desire to find an anchor for the whole. These also hint at a deeper sense of character which encourages further exploration, and a melancholy to the clowning which has real bite.