Tony Law: Go Mr Tony Go!

There’s a point in this runaway train of a show at which the ever-ridiculous Tony Law compares his style of comedy to jazz. He’s not wrong: Go Mr Tony Go! shares the same energy, the free-flowing capriciousness and that same kind of obscurity, which invites some to identify it—rightly or wrongly—as highbrow. 

It may sound like a pompous piece of self-analysis from the Canadian but, like virtually every word that passes his beardy lips, it should not be taken seriously. The man is a fool and a liar of the most brazen sort. There is no panda prostitution crisis. It’s doubtful he absorbed his brother by osmosis. He probably hasn’t given himself a Caesarean.

But even though so little of this gleeful nonsense has any bearing on the audience's real world, Law manages to command attention by dint of sheer momentum and his big, cartoonish presence. For a good three quarters of the set he barely pauses for breath, spewing out a stream of semi-spontaneous thought with more than a few gems among it.

The mockingly self-professed “dangerous” comic is not afraid to take a gamble, and gives a third-person running commentary in which he congratulates or admonishes himself depending on whether it pays off. Self-indulgent in a self-aware kind of way, he delights in dragging out routines to the outer bounds of patience – though the extended riff on the aural possibilities of Gok Wan’s name, for example, could have gone on forever.

His experimental bent means he’s become something of a comic’s comic, but popular appeal means he’s been packing out his venue even working the graveyard shift of noon. By the 45-minute mark some among the crowd begin to glaze over, but Law's ready to second-guess them with a surreal filmed excerpt and a shambolic final set piece. Though quite obviously tacked on, it’s a suitably scrappy end to a scrappy hour.

Law describes his method as "taking his mind for a walk", and he tends to get lost along the way. But as the antithesis to the rash of what he calls “boys in T-shirts noticing things”, this is certainly worth a look.