IT WAS telling that during the boisterous Q&A session that encored Russell Howard's show – culminating in support act Mark Olver being donkey-ridden by an audience member – he decried the editing of his Tough Gig on ITV two nights before. Howard's M
ock The Week appearances have greatly swelled the Bristolian's fanbase, especially among young female admirers, but it's easy to forget just how poorly television's constrictions serve his upbeat sense of humour, excitable segues and giddy, animated strides of the mind.
Howard likes to roam free and engage with all the weird and wonderful people life puts in his path, a seize-the-surreal approach that leads him to denounce all the bitter naysayers envisaging terrible outcomes for every situation.
His greatest moral uncertainty seems to arise from trying to suppress the instinctive belly laughs his capricious brain would otherwise have him stifle upon seeing a pub Jenga set collapse on a dwarf.
Moreover, while it seems incredible that a comic of his experience is still unveiling stories of his teenage buffoonery, Howard brings them to life with the skill of the most consummate storyteller, his boyish, self-deprecating charm at conveying his gauche adolescence smoothing the less palatable details of his lost virginity, of soiling himself at the vision of his parents in werewolf masks or the beautifully developed anecdote of racist transvestitism with which he concluded his set. Marvellous stuff.
