Penguins


Sean Hughes’ latest show (Penguins*) appeared on DVD in ny mailbox this week, so this evening, after we’d gone out for a burrito and La Serpiente Aquatica Negra had spread a bowl of rice and beans over my trousers, we settled down to watch it.

Like most Go Faster Stripe shows, it’s a bit rough round the edges, being filmed in a rather unglamorous venue in Birmingham, in front of a stag party including the husband-to-be dressed up in a hotdog costume, with a succession of odd things strewn across the stage.

There’s a good joke about suicide and eating chips, a punch line that comes about ten seconds before the show stops (a true comedy show never ends, it’s just abandoned) and some strange stories about growing up, getting into cars with strangers, and how the internet has ruined everything (or ruined everyone old enough to remember a life without it). So on the face of it, not the cheeriest of subject matter.

Then again, his previous show was about one of his parents dying, and that wasn’t a gloomfest. You don’t get the Perrier Award at Edinburgh for nothing, after all.

Apart from watching some television and eating a burrito, I didn’t do much today. Well, that’s not strictly true; I ate a bag of corn chips and a bowl of guacamole for lunch, so I went some way towards simulating Mexico in Singapore. If only I’d been speaking Spanish to my wife and child this morning, that would have topped things off.

* Disappointingly, there is hardly any penguin-related material in Penguins. There’s a dancing penguin at the start, but no serried ranks of aquatic birds, nor, indeed, little chocolate biscuits.


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