There’s something for everyone in a Phil Wang show. Puerile jokes and sophisticated ones. Progressive jokes and conservative ones. New jokes – and revivals too, in a set that includes routines regular Wang-watchers will have seen before. But if they’re olden, they’re usually golden, in a 75-minute show that can only bolster the British Malaysian standup’s burgeoning reputation.
You get a little bit of everything he’s good at tonight, as our host kicks off with cross-cultural, British-Chinese material of the type that made his name. As ever, in this riff on the British fear of re-heating rice, Wang casts himself as the equable Mr Commonsense perplexed by the eccentricities of those around him. That’s never funnier than with the routine (from his 2022 show The Real Hero in All This) about the propriety requiring nipples to be covered even when the, ahem, “boob blob” is exposed.
Sometimes, those eccentricities are what you and I might call idealism: his sister refusing to eat octopus because it’s too intelligent, say, or cyclists seeking to traverse the urban environment without threat to their lives. I don’t always love Wang’s choosing to joke at these people’s expense – but there’s no denying he does so very entertainingly.
In those cases, it’s about extrapolating the concept ad absurdum (if we base our dietary decisions on intelligence, where will it end?). Elsewhere, Wang gets laughs by sending up his own mild-mannered equanimity – with a great routine about not finding Kendrick Lamar’s lyrics relatable, say, which devolves into a joke concerning the N-word that’s more joyous than a joke concerning the N-word has any right to be.
Even when the quality of the routine is questionable (I’m not sure if the set-up quite works for his onanistic one about fact-checking his recent memoir), Wang gets away with it because – particularly with his autobiographical material – he’s cultivated such a droll manner, forever referring to himself in the third person as if he were some #legend. Legend, he may not yet be: this isn’t a show that ever quite lets rip. But the gags, and the persona, are honed for your constant amusement.
