My name is Dominic and I am a sarcasm addict. It is a few minutes since my last sarky comment, far longer since any such comment really ripped through preconceptions in the way I suppose I must think it might. But, hell, it took years to get that default setting of “say the opposite of what you actually believe to be the case”, and it’s not an easy habit to break. Not even when people look at you as if you’re being needlessly confusing or arbitrarily facetious. I mean, as if!
See? I’m incorrigible. But this week it’s not my fault, right? This week I’m under the sway of a grandmaster of irony, Todd Barry, one of the sarkiest sods in showbusiness. Starting his week-long run here on Jubilee concert night, this gloriously dubious New York comic thanked us for breaking into our Jubilee — “whatever that is” — and spending our Bank Holiday — “whatever that is” — in his company. Annie Lennox and Madness, he assured us, would be swinging by later.
Now, for most of us, rote sarcasm is neither big nor clever. But that’s because we can’t lace it with the poetical absurdism that Barry does. And he targets himself with the same delicious disdain he affords estate agents, pretentious Californians, taxi drivers, whoever. He is adamant that he is stand-up small fry, despite appearing on sitcoms such as Flight of the Conchords. Yet when he promises that his material is going to “murder” or “massacre” us, he knows just how stupid that sounds, and that he has some great material.
Like Stewart Lee, he’ll soothingly analyse his act as he performs it. His default setting is to find an anomaly, rubbish it, and then to expand exponentially upon the illogic he’s uncovered. Reductio ad absurdum, ad infinitum. His closing set piece, in which he takes apart a magazine article that tells men how to treat women, is the gift that keeps on giving.
Granted, his cerebral style can leave a vacuum when he loses momentum, as he does here 40-odd minutes in. There’s a lull during which you want him to change direction or to move up a gear. Yet I left energised by his wry inventiveness.
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It’s not for everyone — some people in this Anglo-American audience were left cold and left early. But for the ironically inclined, his name is Todd Barry, and he can massacre.
Box office: 020-7478 0100, to Saturday