Cruel Little Man
At The Stand in Newcastle on 17 November to see Mike Rice perform his show “Cruel Little Man”. It’s an hour of standup comedy. Mike’s co-podcaster Vittorio something opened for him.
Vittorio was alright. He’s lower-energy than Mike, which is fine, but he doesn’t backfill the lack of energy it with better material. He’s better at riffing and playing with a room’s energy than he is at delivering the jokes he'd planned out beforehand.
Mike’s delivery and character are better than the jokes themselves, which tend towards the basic (calling someone a pedo) or incongruent (“I took LSD once and thought I was a black woman”). His Irish accent and mannerisms do a lot of the heavy lifting; most of the punchlines reduce to Can you believe I just said that?
However. There was a group of four sat in the third row down, centre stage, who would not shut up, yelping and woo-ing and whispering to each other throughout the show. They started with Vittorio, who determined that they were coworkers out together, and that they were cops, with subsequent riffing overtaking the rest of his planned material. They kept it going with Mike, who seemed less inclined to dismantle hecklers but who clearly started to get exasperated by the end of the set. We all had a good laugh at their expense.