IN MY HUMBLE OPINION:EVERYTHING ABOUT Lee Evans is "record breaking".
The DVD sales, the arena tours, the amount of sweat that pours out of him every night. Just last week we learnt that he had sold almost £7 million worth of tickets for his 2011 tour in just one day. Between 9am and 6pm last Friday he sold 227,424 tickets (at €40 a pop in Dublin) – this represents the biggest first-day sale of any comedy tour in recent times.
What in the name of Lenny Bruce is the attraction here? I’m sure he’s a lovely man and a consummate professional and all of that, but I’ve been at a Lee Evans show and sat there bewildered as hundreds around me collapsed with laughter at his antics.
“Is it me or is it them?” I thought as I watched Evans fall over, stand up and fall over again to hysterical effect? It’s not that his act leaves me cold (which it does), more that I feel there is something here I’m not getting but everyone else is. Is this my fault? Is the whole show operating on a level that is beyond my comprehension?
I kept watching, waiting for a way in, hoping to join in with the communal hilarity, but nothing happened. He ran about, waved his arms, bumped into things and told stories that started off nowhere and then went backwards from that point.
I looked at the programme – maybe there's a glossary there that will decode the performance. Maybe the whole show was one giant acrostic; maybe was all ferociously avant-garde. But no, it was just desperately unfunny. He finished by doing a mime to Queen's Bohemian Rhapsodywhich was greeted with a tsunami of laughter from the audience, but which just gave me an acute migraine.
The tickets for Lee Evan’s show at Dublin’s 02 are already on sale and going briskly. The show is on October 26th. That’s not next Tuesday, but October 26th, 2011.
The fact that most of Evans’s giant tour of the UK and Ireland next year is nearly sold out is further evidence of the chasm that exists between the personal opinion expressed here and the general comedy show-going population.
Evans putting his 02 tickets on sale just a year before the actual show takes place seems like last-minute behaviour compared with that of another comedy star.
Tickets for Peter Kay’s show at the 02 went up for sale in December 2009 – shows that don’t take place until late April/early May of 2011. But unlike Evans, at least there’s always the slim chance that Kay, in the intervening 16 months, will come up with something funny.
