CityLife

Tim Vine: The Joke-amotive

Tim Vine
The Lowry
February 28, 2010

When a comedian bounds on to the stage wearing a hat fashioned out of knitting yarns and tells you he's going to take you on the 'joka-motive', it's tempting to just grab your coat and run.

But if there's one message to take away from an insight into the strange imagination of Tim Vine, it's to stick with it, at least for the first five minutes.

The younger brother of Jeremy 'Panorama' Vine's brand of irreverent comedy isn't high brow think Harry Hill, not Mark Thomas.

This is your man if you like quick-fire quips peppered with more puns than a Sun headline writer could dream of and ten-second comedy songs though.

Vine is misleading at first, seemingly a stand-up who has borrowed all his slightly cheesy gags from a 1950s comedian's joke book.

Yet the jokes are fired at you so quickly that while you may groan at the occasionally obvious, it takes you a few seconds to realise the punchline is never quite what you expect.

He's also an excellent physical comedian who particularly shines when performing his surreal songs, inspired by everything from bad family holidays to,er, torches that look like bananas (you had to be there).

His turn at The Lowry wasn't flawless, when he forgot a crucial line to a gag about boxing for example, but he persevered as you would expect from a man who once broke the Guinness World Record for the most jokes told in an hour.

What is most refreshing is that this is a comic who is essentially the class joker someone less interested in being clever or rude but just gets a kick from making you laugh.

And, as long as you enjoy silliness on stage, it's definitely worth getting through those first mind-warping five minutes.

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