I arrived at the Invisible Dot just as Rory Scovel was doing some loopy dad dancing to Maneater by Hall & Oates and mumbling the words. Or at least making sounds. It was a pretty compelling, pretty crazy start for an hour and a bit from the American stand-up that skitted around all sorts of areas, from hard-hitting satire to zany goofball musical humour and smut.
The closest comparisons are probably Tony Law and David O’Doherty. Scovel has a way of taking a stupid approach to a serious subject and still making a piercing point. On the well-trodden terrain of Trump he had a brilliantly simple line that I won’t spoil by printing it here. At another point during the routine, comparing the election to a talent show gone horribly wrong, he had a wicked Bill Hicks glint in his eye. He also had a screwy, mischievous neo-Hicksian take on the subject of abortion, while clearly coming out as pro-choice.
Elsewhere there was bread-and-butter observational humour with a twist. Why do people always shout "keep away" when some glass shatters, as if nobody knows how dangerous broken glass is? Scovel’s canny tactic is to dive in quickly and do his bit by finding a big piece, leaving others to scrabble about among the shards. Which is pretty much what everyone tries to do isn’t it?
What was particularly nice about this set was that he kept the audience on their toes. Just as you thought you had Scovel nailed he would move into different territory - at one point tinkering on his Yamaha keyboards or doing cringey MOR songwriter grimaces, at another point turning the lights off and the reverb up or doing a scattering of stoner chat about mushrooms.
If only he had quit after an hour this would have gone down as one of my favourite shows of the year, but one of his final riffs was about using a Fleshlight on those lonely nights on the road. For the first minute I wondered what the big deal was about using a torch and then realised what a fleshlight actually was (it’s a portable vagina in a tube). My problem wasn’t the smuttiness. It was still a pretty funny routine, but the confusion meant that it didn’t land as quickly as his earlier material.
But this was a minor quibble - maybe fleshlights are more popular back in America. At a time when it looks like all the quality comedy is relocating to Edinburgh, here's one for Londoners. There are two more back-to-back shows tonight. Don't miss.
At Invisible Dot, N1, tonight, Aug 4. Tickets here. Info on global dates here.
