Rosie Jones was going to write a gag-packed show, she tells us – but then she got too busy. Delivered with her signature wicked grin, that’s a near-the-knuckle joke, given Jones’s TV ubiquity these days. Happy to report, then, that – hectic celebrity schedule notwithstanding – Triple Threat is another endearing and sly stage outing for the 33-year-old, chronicling her life as a national-treasure-in-waiting, ascending the property ladder but – judging by all the smutty gags and juvenile behaviour – making few other moves in maturity’s direction.
Take Jones’s opening gambit, which finds her impatient for the death of David Attenborough – not a blazingly original pose for a comedian in search of off-colour laughs. For Jones, it’s purely pragmatic: “Penguin Boy” is blocking her access to the national-treasure pantheon. One gear-grinding segue later, she is telling us about house-hunting and buying a flat, a process that finally reveals the usefulness of her dad, and which Jones conducts (a droll running joke, this) along the lines of her only property-world reference point, the board game Monopoly.
Throughout, our host plays the big unruly kid, doing things she shouldn’t do, inept at the things she should. At her most rudimentary, her jokes trade in that one delinquent dimension alone – such as the one about unattractive vulvas, which doesn’t exactly make the heart sing. More often, she leads you to expect a one-dimensional punchline and delivers something multifaceted instead: the fine gags about all the TV shows she isn’t on, for instance, or the show-stopping pun to which her mum adds a pedantic footnote, or the tricksy line about Vladimir Putin that ends a routine about being dumped for a Ukrainian refugee.
Latterly, the show addresses – and disavows – Jones’s role as a spokesperson for disability of all stripes, and relates an encounter on a bus with another passenger with cerebral palsy. All the Jones trademarks are here, in an anecdote embroiling irreverence towards disability, mischievous misbehaviour, filthy sex and self-mockery of her status as “the people’s princess”. Key to that status, hypothetical or otherwise, is an abundant self-irony and lovable lack of starriness, both in evidence in this charming and amusing show.
