Comedy: Paul Foot (★★★★)

Perth Comedy Festival
May 5, 2023

I really should stop reviewing Paul Foot’s stand up comedy.
Not stop seeing him, mind, because he’s one of the funniest people on the planet, but because writing about his act is a little like telling your partner how much you love them. Again.
The first time I saw Foot, back at the first version of the Perth Comedy Festival in 2012, I was literally helpless with laughter. Friends watching me watching him were genuinely concerned something might burst.
The sad, inevitable truth about seeing him every chance you get since is that the wonderful disorder he creates in you wears off, especially when you see newcomers in the audience behaving like a dog kicking its hind leg as its tummy is scratched as Foot’s carefully crafted madness overwhelms them.
Despite his on-stage paroxysms, his violent bobbing and bizarre, leaping walks that physically punctuate his material, there’s something charming about a comedian who welcomes the audience “Greetings!” and performs it without obscenity (one indecency, another word for fellatio slipped in late in his monologue, may have been the only lewdity I can recall in all the times I’ve seen him).
But his subject matter, from the priapic and environmental impact of powdered rhino horn to demented ad copy for SpecSavers and the Swiss assisted dying clinics Pegasos, from the virtue of the word “charlatan” to the critical importance of the year 1903 to our perception of everything from wars to serial killers, all delivered in (what he claims are) “extended and ill-advised ad-libs”.
It’s all hilarious, erudite and culturally literate, and deeply, deeply funny (too deep, possibly, for the stony-faced cohort in every Paul Foot audience who are clearly wondering what on earth they’ve wandered in to).
What it is is a disturbance of the comedy spheres as ambitious as very few comics – Spike Milligan is the only one who comes immediately to mind – have attempted. And, fear not, even if you do see him as often as I have, familiarity will only breed respect.
Here's a taste…