Sometimes at a standup gig, the environment elevates the material, and context is, if not all, then a lot. This is TV fixture Judi Love’s first UK tour, and tonight it brings her home to Hackney. On coronation weekend, what ensues is two parts standup show to one part crowning of the local girl done good, now returned with an armful of humblebrag tales of hobnobbing with royalty and buying extortionate footwear. What makes it fun is the palpable audience connection, and the expressivity and command our host brings to not always exceptional material.
That expressive flair is on display early, when Love begins her life story with an act-out depicting the clapped-out coming together of her ageing parents’ egg and sperm. This one puts a real marker down: haughty and deadpan may be Love’s default mode, but she’s no slouch at physical comedy, painting this anthropomorphised conception scene with precision as well as a canny eye for the funny.
It also sets a template, as Love zeroes in on the bawdy and the body (“She’s not like this on Loose Women”) with routines about smear tests, “knickers that should be downgraded to period knickers”, and her kids interrupting when she’s shaving her pubic hair. Later set pieces on her love life find Judi unable to resist “good dick, bad blokes”, whose (mis)behaviour she amusingly itemises, then arraying the delights of “spontaneous sex in a long-term relationship”, where mechanical mutual arousal does not preclude a conversation about Hannah in HR.
Much of this confines us to stock standup terrain. Love is no innovator, but she breathes new life into these well-worn scenarios, a respiratory feat with which the gales of audience laughter surely help. Later she address her newfound celebrity, with a visit to Buckingham Palace (cue amusingly overdone caricature of posh diction) and an anecdote about buying Jimmy Choos for her Royal Variety Performance gig. These sections strain to assert Love’s unstarriness, while demonstrating the opposite – which could be offputting, save for a home town audience eager to embrace her, and joyfully, as one of their own. With this local Love-in, I found it fun to be swept along.
