Tony Law: Nonsense Overdrive

We are forgiven! The pardons we receive from Tony Law as he arrives on stage via the audience, greeting us in trademark nonsensical style. With mad-scientist hair and grisly get-up, his material is there to match: a completely bonkers hour of falsely observed truisms and prickly ironic musings on the middle-class (though he has most likely settled into that lifestyle quite well).

Fans of Law will not be disappointed. Loony rants involving everything from bourgeois tedium to Peruvian coffee farms, the dark side of the Moon and “owlcats” are rich with imagination and craft—under the guise of chaos—and squashed into an exquisite mosaic. Nobody is safe: Law hammers the younger generation of comedians who, you know, “write their set down on their laptops”, while addressing that debt and insecurity will prevent that same generation from buying a house. This is iconoclasm disguised as aimlessness.

Law is like a hurricane in a teacup, bursting into life at the start of every digression. He drags us through a labyrinthine mind, puzzling over non-sequiturs and subverting the very definition of a worthy punch line. The only time Law stutters is when he tackles the regular material, integrating jokes on family life and children too neatly, before forcing himself back into absurdity. Still, it’s a journey worth embarking on and it’s easy to get lost in space with Law, in the very irrationalities and silliness we try to avoid when analysing standup comedy.