‘I needed to say it more than you needed to hear it,” says Jamali Maddix towards the end of King Crud. Is he joking? A disconcerting feature of this touring show is that you leave it a little apprehensive for the east Londoner’s wellbeing – which isn’t ideal, comedy-wise. There’s lots to recommend the hour, not least Maddix’s devil-may-care attitude, fluency and playfulness with his audience, and complete refusal to kowtow to the pieties of the age. But the longer it proceeds, and the more he alludes to his depression, anxiety and the therapy he’s receiving for sex addiction, the more unresolved the gig starts to feel.
It’s not that mental health is off-limits for comedians. Far from it. But convention dictates that a comic’s life struggles are related in retrospect and tend towards redemption. That’s not Maddix’s way: he’s not a serious-minded, soul-baring kind of comic. And in any case, he’s not over his travails, he’s in the thick of them. Nothing he says about his state of mind or his compulsive sex life lets us off the hook, but nor does it appeal for sympathy. It’s all just offhand jokes, from an act who professes not to care – about Covid, Ukraine, the Taliban and perhaps even about himself.
Perhaps only Maddix could put you in that uneasy place and still make you laugh. He does here, with routines about his nostalgia for terrorism, reflections on his biracial identity, and reportage from the frontline of sex addiction. It’s not well worked out: it feels like the 31-year-old has arrived with some ill-formed thoughts, to be developed in dialogue with his audience. And it’s sometimes sordid: Maddix himself is still working out whether he’s a misogynist, he says, or a feminist ally. But that working out is kept entertaining by a man with a cartoon voice and the kind of #idgaf honesty that can’t help but keep an audience on its toes.
A closing anecdote (drugs and brothels feature) offers zero closure to a show in which we peer beneath the rock of Maddix’s troubled psyche, only to find Maddix’s face laughing back up at us.
• Jamali Maddix: King Crud is at Colchester Arts Centre, 1 September, then touring.
