Rob Newman appears to have carved out for himself a unique genre of comedy, which I’m going to call, ‘temperate anthropological humour’. In this latest show, he delivers a somewhat thought-provoking trot (definitely not a sprint) through snapshots of lesser explored - and sometimes invented - aspects of history, popular culture, and philosophy, punctuated by song and dance and garnished with a potpourri of subtly comical personal anecdotes and, to my relief, the occasional diversion into the surreal.
If that sounds disjointed, it is, and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it...
My problem (amongst others, though unrelated to the evening), is that I couldn’t stop comparing the Newman of today with the Newman of the past (and asking myself has Newman become an Oldman?...).
Any Gen-Xer with the slightest appreciation of comedy will remember Newman well. First, from the early 90s cult TV comedy sketch programme the Mary Whitehouse Experience, in which he and comedy partner David Baddiel buddied up with duo Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis (secondary school corridors reverberated with the sounds of the show’s infamous catchphrases “Milky, milky,” and “You see that…” – insert something punitively gross or offensively insignificant – “that’s you that is,”), followed by Newman and Baddiel’s rise to rock-star fame level success as a standalone partnership, being the first comedy act to sell out the Wembley Arena. They were heady, exciting times for comedy, which was branded the new rock ‘n’ roll, and, again drawing parallels to antics typically associated with the music industry, the pair apparently had a huge row a fortnight before the Wembley gig and vowed never to work together afterwards.
We all fancied Newman or wanted to be him. He was cool and confident; a lefty who with his comedy comrades skilfully, cheekily, appeared to be tearing down the establishment. Even Newman and Baddiel’s unusual rise to super-stardom seemed to be a profound statement against ‘the man’. They were successful rule-breakers who made us cry with laughter. But, just as the baby boomers who burned their bras and smoked weed in defiance of the existing societal structures slowly eased into a standard, more conservative middle age, have the sarcastic, satirical, indie-kids of the 90s also descended into a humdrum, Hampstead-coffee-shop midlife existence?
Newman now presents more as a hesitant-at-times waistcoat-wearing university professor (veering towards the very character he mocked in History Today with Baddiel, my friend observed), and indeed his comedy reminds me of perhaps spending an hour with an affable teacher: you have a chuckle, they offer a titbit of insight to their personal life, and somehow you’ve learned the names of the geological eras. It’s all pleasant enough.
As the evening unfolded, Newman ambled between mildly amusing accounts of his day-to-day existence as a husband and father and interesting as well as daft interpretations of historical and anthropological events, to bizarre re-tellings of fantastical personal experiences; for example, he relayed an occasion on which he realised he had a permanent frown and so instead learned to ‘cosmic smile’ causing the rest of his day to erupt into a scene of all-singing all-dancing cinematic musical theatre as the whole of London smiled with him. And, at one point towards the end of the show, Newman transmorphs into a version Paul McCartney who has had an operation to look permanently mildly surprised. It was during the latter more abstract, less intellectual, jaunts that I felt Newman found his flow, or maybe it’s more that he was more on my vibe there - or perhaps it was nostalgia; I caught a glimpse of that younger, bolder, freer Rob Newman I remember from my past.
The fact is, the audience laughed consistently throughout the evening. No sides were split, I don’t think, but there was a shared smile, for sure – not a cosmic one, but a smile nonetheless. Perhaps at our age, that’s enough.