Tim FitzHigham: Stop the Pigeon

As his show veers toward anticlimax, Tim FitzHigham speaks enviously of comedians whose sets consist of actual jokes. They, he says, are in a position of total control over their material whereas “if you tell the truth, tell a story, you never know what the ending's going to be.” What he means by this is that if you construct a show around a pointless bet that you've made with a fellow comic purely in order to generate material, its ending will most likely be as unsatisfying as the premise of the show itself. Can the performer transport a letter over a distance of fifty miles within an hour, using only technology that was available to 18^th century aristocrats? Deep down, it's unlikely that even Tim FitzHigham cares.

Still, the star tries his best to keep our energy levels up. He gamely bellows phrases like “that's genius!” and “let's do this!” to an admittedly receptive audience and assures us that everything we hear “is absolutely true.” All the while, he employs a wide-eyed, hectoring style of delivery that places emphasis on his every word and kills countless good lines.

The key problem with Stop the Pigeon is that the protagonist's motivations are never clear. We just have to accept that he naturally feels inclined to follow bad ideas through to conclusion. That the relatively dry telling of an unremarkable story forms the backbone of this multimedia show is unfortunate and one suspects that the performer would be better off applying himself to the whimsical word play in which he excels.