My wife and I spotted the young couple while the house lights were still up, as the strains of REM’s It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine) drifted through the auditorium — some wry mood music to prepare the audience gathered at the Pieter Toerien Theatre for comedian Alan Committie’s latest show, Apocalaughs Now!
They wandered down to the front row cradling two bottles of wine and two glasses. Ah, we thought, exchanging a knowing glance, the twentysomething dating scene: hormones pumping, a visit to the theatre to give a sense of sophistication (and to avoid all those awkward pauses in conversation) and lots of alcohol to manage the nerves. Remember the days?
Then again, even when my wife and I were dating, we would never have made the mistake of sitting in the front row of a comedy show and getting through two bottles of wine in an hour. Nature has a way of calling, and after a while the young lovers found themselves taking turns dashing up the aisle to the loo.
Ordinarily this kind of thing makes me bridle. Put yourself in the position of the performer: hardly any stage time for the past 18 months and now, when you’re finally back in front of an audience, two of them decide to get drunk and play musical chairs. It must be infuriating.
But Committie is no ordinary performer. A consummate comic professional, he turns these things into the stuff of hilarious high jinks. By the end of Apocalaughs Now!, we all felt we were best friends with the boozy pair in the front row — we’d laughed both with them and at them, we knew their quirks and we had to admit that we shared some of their foibles.
Ditto with the handful of other audience members who unwittingly helped to make comedy gold. One of Committie’s great strengths is that he doesn’t just deliver a set; he talks to you, not at you, and much of the laughter he elicits comes from the connections he draws between his material and the idiosyncrasies of a given audience. You can tell that he thrives on this interaction.
Still, it’s a risky business. At the show I watched, Committie had to work hard to bring an initially sluggish crowd along with him. By the end, we were all on our feet applauding the effort. It was not just a standing ovation but seemed to be a moment of recognition, a collective acknowledgment that it was wonderful but also kind of weird to be back in a theatre, and that, yes, we could laugh in the face of Covid-19 and economic anxiety and energy crises.
With Committie as our captain, we had navigated some difficult personal terrain: losing a job, falling out of love, growing old. As for the public sphere, what cause is there not to despair? Somehow it was all covered with a lightness of touch, turned into the same comedy material as shared quotidian experiences: not being able to tap your card in the right place when paying at a restaurant, the reassuring familiarity of cherished TV shows, absurd song lyrics.
And then, of course, there’s the flip chart. Committie with a marker pen in hand and a topic to spur free association is guaranteed to give even the most stolid and cynical audience member the giggles. It has become one of his signature set pieces, a way to wind a thread through what may appear to be delightful chaos but is in fact a finely honed, tightly structured piece of theatre.
Indeed, Apocalaughs Now! is perhaps the most theatrical of Committie’s shows (and I’ve seen a few of them over the years), from his dramatic entry onto a visually impressive scene to the carefully staged set pieces that punctuate 90 minutes of one-man entertainment. But there is also plenty of space for spontaneity. There has to be, so that the comedian can laugh at himself — for a missed lighting cue, say — and so that he can get to know his audience ... and help us to laugh at ourselves.
• Apocalaughs Now! is at the Pieter Toerien Theatre at Montecasino until 14 November.
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