Paul Foot: Words

“It’s funny but you don’t know why,” sums-up Paul Foot of an hour in which he’s screamed at length about what a “palaver” life is, pedantically explored the differences between the words “rockery” and “rookery,” and attempted to inject into popular usage phrases such as “you look like a Hispanic bathtub” via a long list of brain-fart non-sequiturs entitled ‘My Madness’. Subjective opinion, Paul, much as many people in the audience tonight do seem to strongly agree with you. Even the ones in the front row drenched in spit (he fairly froths at the mouth once he gets going).

Dressed in a silver lamé jacket and high-wasted trousers with a mullet and severe fringe, the high-voiced High Wycombe character comedian is the guy who would have been kicked out of 1970s Slade for looking a bit daft. It’s all part of an exuberantly silly package steeped in Python-esque, very British absurdity. But lord, is it hard work constantly being frantically entreated to laugh not at the actual material but the fact of Foot having the crackpot gall and enthusiasm to deliver jokes he perfectly well knows are not logically funny. Long spiels on loneliness and the intricacies of mating-ritual text etiquette, angry rants about toast, that kind of thing.

It’s a cult thing, basically (Foot acknowledges as much by running his own secret-society style fan club, The Guild of Connoisseurs). The rest of us whose senses of humour just aren't wired that way, to quote ‘My Madness’ again, will just have to “seek solace in the grief sausage”.