Review: 'Stewart Francis Live at the Grand Opera House'

By Tom Clarke

With opening acts, it is often hard to grab the audience’s attention, especially as they haven’t paid to see a support. It generally requires a thicker skin than for most other comedy shows. This support act was Matt Rudge, a young comedian from the West Country. One of his main strengths was interacting with the audience, which showed his brash yet charming confidence and warmed him to most of the audience. He was a storytelling comedian who liked to play along with the audience in each joke and, for the most part, this worked very well. Occasionally, however, his stories would become a little bit too long and the punch line not funny enough to sustain the amount of time dedicated to it. Nevertheless, the last thing I took away from this was one of his last jokes, which was a one liner and didn’t sink that well with the audience – His response to this was “you better get used to those as you’ve got a full hour in front of you!” This led to one of his first rounds of applause and set us up nicely for Stewart Francis.

Francis is a Canadian born comedian who has established himself in both the US and UK. He is frequently on comedy panel shows such as QI, Mock the Week and 8 Out of 10 Cats and has written for famous American shows like ‘Tonight With Jay Leno.’ This year at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival he was awarded the best joke award for his one liner “You know who gives kids a bad name? Posh and Becks.” He is one of the most successful one liner comedians in the World. My first worry when coming to see him was if his material would remain fresh throughout the hour-long runtime. One line comedy is very hard to maintain for 60 minutes and audiences can easily get tired of the same routine. This was not the case with Stuart Francis as he came out firing with some great surrealist stories.

His first few jokes settled the audience in for a night of thinking, and of course, huge amounts of laughter. He started to use a variety of props, voice-overs and great story arcs to give his act a sense of vitality. I was not subject to the same style for more than five minutes, with his satirical impression of observational comedy to his mocking time wasting tactic of playing ping-pong offstage. The two jokes that really stood out for me came at points during the night where his one liners were starting to get fewer and fewer laughs. “I’m not a plagiarist! – His words not mine!” After about two seconds of silence, the theatre erupted with laughter, which was a usual occurrence with the challenging wordplay which Stuart Francis uses. The next was rather more inappropriate yet got the audience laughing as well as groaning. “My uncle ejaculated on me the other day! I’m glad I got that off my chest!” His jokes are simple but his deadpan delivery gives them the edge they need to make you roar with laughter.

Overall I thought the whole experience was well worth the money (even though I didn’t pay for my ticket) and I would definitely go and see him again. Highly recommendable - 5 Stars!!

You can listen to Tom's review this Sunday on Yorworld by visiting the URY website.