CityLife

Stephen Lynch: The Three Balloons Tour

Stephen Lynch
The Lowry
March 11, 2010

With Flight Of The Conchords taking the world by storm with their off-beat musical stand-up, now is a good time for copycat acts. 

But 38-year-old American Stephen Lynch has been pedalling his brand of bruising no-holds barred comedy for years and has built up a committed band of followers.

I've rarely seen such pre-show anticipation for a comedian, and when he arrives on stage to plough into Waiting (For My AIDS Test to Come Back), the audience are delirious. 

Lynch quickly sets the tone for the evening and it plummets fearlessly to new depths from there on in.

He clearly comes from the school of thought that believes the best way to deal with a taboo is to tear into it. 

There are songs about Nazi girlfriends, extreme sexual fetishes, children with special needs, dad's who hate their own kids, terrible tattoos and the Medieval Bush, a song about pubic hair in the 15th century.

Lynch intersperses his music with sporadic stints of stand-up, which appear random only for those jokes to reach a carefully manufactured crescendo.

Some of the most riotous moments are Lynch's brief musical efforts where he sings fictional diary entries detailing the impending misfortune of famous people throughout history. Anne Frank, Christopher Reeve and Michael Jackson all get panned, and each segment gets a bigger laugh than the last.

Lynch handles the audience well on his own and does well to keep a lid on the tirelessly idiotic hecklers, but he also gets some help from his brother Drew, who erroneously wears a Manchester United top, and comic sidekick David Josefsberg.

One of the best laughs of the night is the cringe worthy joke Lynch makes about the Holocaust to Jewish Josefsberg which culminates in a reconciliatory version of Purple Rain, also fulfilling a Prince skit that started the show.

Sometimes the intellect in his comedy is overcome with the downgrade smut that would not be wasted in a American college fraternity, but was on some on some of the audience, and some American-centric references are lost on us, but Lynch's strength is making those potentially awkward blunders blend seamlessly into his act and being so funny you just don't care.