All the countries of the world have their own bread, runs one of Michael McIntyre’s routines in his new show Macnificent. But what does Britain have? The boring old loaf. And all the countries have their own cheese too, runs the follow-up. And which one is ours? Mild cheddar. That’s we Brits, according to our host: aren’t we all just so lovably, incorrigibly bland?
Well, speak for yourself, you may wish to respond: there are traffic islands that have spent less time than McIntyre in the middle of the road. But resistance is futile – or at least, self-defeating. You can sit there thinking of all the strong cheeses and characterful breads Britain produces, or you can be seduced by McIntyre’s entertaining generalisations (OK, maybe we are bland!) into having as much fun as many, many other people in his audience. Don’t overthink things. Park your cynicism. There’s fun to be had here.
And there has been for a remarkably long time. The 47-year-old screens a montage at the start of his show, of significant gigs since he first stepped on to the Comedy Store stage 24 years ago. It reminded me: this guy has been huge for ages. (He barely seems to have aged either, damn him.) This is a comic who struck, fairly early, on a formula that would yield colossal commercial success, and who has stuck with it since. Reader, let me reassure – or disappoint – you: that formula changes not one jot with Macnificent, McIntyre’s first standup tour since 2018.
It includes, as ever, fantastic jokes and routines on almost parodically relatable subjects. You want 10 tight minutes on middle-aged wine-drinking? McIntyre is your man. Interested in a riff on yawning? McIntyre is here for you, itemising the oddity of this universal human behaviour, the comedy of failing to suppress it when in conversation, the incongruity of its seeming contagiousness. (“How do you catch tiredness?!”) Not for the first time, you marvel that such an ostensibly banal observation can feel so fresh, and deliver – in McIntyre’s expert hands – such a substantial comic payload.
But it does, as does a fine nugget of physical comedy about McIntyre and wife in the marital bed, regretting the purchase of a mattress that’s firm on one half and soft on the other. And a delightful routine about youth football, casting our host as a concerned dad on the sidelines while his angelic son is aggressed by overdeveloped 15-year-olds with abundant facial hair and testosterone to spare.
What you don’t get is any sense of the real McIntyre, the man behind the joke machine. McIntyre watchers will know he’s suffered a setback in recent months, with the prompt cancellation of the US edition of his gameshow The Wheel. If this is significant to him, if he has dreams of breaking America, how he feels about being a primetime superstar – you’ll find the answers to none of this in his stage act, which casts him as an everyman whose concerns are indistinguishable from yours and mine.
Isn’t that stretching things? The man’s (I’m guessing) a multimillionaire. But part of McIntyre’s genius is how his act neutralises class in this most class-conscious of countries. Most major mass-appeal comics are proudly working class (Mo Gilligan, John Bishop, Micky Flanagan, Sarah Millican). Those who aren’t – such as Jack Whitehall – have to burlesque their own poshness for popular approval. But McIntyre seldom exaggerates or apologises for his privilege; indeed he rarely affords it the slightest significance. It’s there if you’re looking for it, but rendered irrelevant by the man’s superpower relatability, a personality so democratic as to completely override this or that mention of having a gardener or dining on gnocchi.
And so McIntyre’s Covid experiences, according to Macnificent at least, are the same as all our Covid experiences: cutting his family’s hair, cultivating an Amazon dependency. But even audiences developing an immunity by now to coronavirus comedy (myself among them) will be tickled by McIntyre’s novel take – in which a birthday party for his wife transmogrifies, via a Covid diagnosis for McIntyre himself, into a mortal threat to his whole family.
There are lesser routines in the show. The rude wordplay that ends act one is a bit effortful, and the section on his dieting hacks when on a trip to the US requires a greater measure of contrivance than the best of his work. Sometimes it’s too obvious that McIntyre isn’t just delivering a comedy routine, he’s drilling a new catchphrase for the merch. One of the least convincing gags of the evening, meanwhile, finds our host panicking, on the release of tickets for this tour, that he’s gone out of fashion and no one’s going to come. Give over, Michael! I wouldn’t bet against another 24 years of adulation: Macnificent finds the McIntyre machine as well-oiled as ever.
