CityLife

Lee Mack

Lee Mack
The Lowry
March 7, 2010

Lee Mack came to the stage heralded by support act Simon Evans as "this generation’s Ken Dodd".

That’s not a bad parallel. Mack is defiantly old school, deploys something of Dodd’s frenetic delivery and startled befuddlement with the modern world, and he does it with a healthy dose of silliness.

A case in point: he had a computer tech asking him: “Have you tried disabling cookies?” to which Mack quipped: “Well, I once bit the legs off a gingerbread man.”

Mainstream fame for Blackburn-raised Mack came with Not Going Out – a sit com more “com” than “sit”. With gag machine Tim Vine also on board, characters are barely allowed to draw breath without exhaling a punchline. Yet the situation is deeply implausible. Why do two ill-matched singletons sharing a modest flat need a cleaner?

Mack’s stand-up is even more joke-a-second. But his real strength is in weaving a cast of characters drawn from the audience into the routine. Front row victim Steve was dubbed a child molester, Lynn from Ashton under Lyne was given the third degree (“How old are you? Sorry that’s rude. How heavy are you?”) and several others were gently toyed with.

The punters in the Lowry’s side circle looked like they were on a “ride that’s broken down at Alton Towers”.

Mack played to the home crowd with a silly walk, part Ian Brown, part Liam Gallagher and part Charlie Chaplin, and opined that Gallagher’s accent, taken to an extreme, sounded as if he was “constipated with Manchesterness”. Meanwhile, the scouse accent, in extremis, becomes the language of dolphins. You had to be there.

There was a great schtick about having a one-night stand with pop star Pink. “I’m a massive fan of snooker and six points is six points,” he said, extending the joke to include Cilla Black, Simply Red and the yellow Simpsons.

Mack did the music hall drunk – with one leg rooted to the spot - mutated into Leonard Rossiter, and did a foul-mouthed version of Bruce Forsyth. But, yes, he’s this generation’s Ken Dodd, finding our funny bones without need of a tickle stick.

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