The Cambridge Geek

A Normal... Love

Annoyingly, I've missed the first two of these, so given how much I enjoyed this one, I'll have to keep an eye out for the repeats.

Henry Normal presents a half hour of standup, covering the rather broad topic of "love"; love for friends, love for family, and the sweaty pulpy stuff that we like to pretend is love.

He presents us with a mixture of one-liners, short reminiscences and brief poems, both serious and silly about love, in the autumn of his life, when things are "going a different colour and dropping off".

The tales dig into the messier parts of romance, love red in tooth and claw, and don't attempt to put a gloss onto the cruel truths.

Which makes it more than a little hilarious, especially when he regales us with tales of shaving off cold sores, undeletable google searches and XXL dildos. These are all placed in the context of his unrelentingly working-class upbringing, with a self-deprecating acceptance of the hand-me-downs from his elder sister.

I'll confess I'm not a fan of his longer, near-prose poems which pepper the show, which aim at a more serious, caring bent, but I do enjoy the shorter quipperies. While the poems undoubtedly form an important part of the work, they feel like interruptions to what is more of a standup show generally. Still, they never last very long, and the rest of it makes up for it.

His delivery is also spot-on, with a couple of excellent examples of the "pause as punchline", where the absence of a joke allows the audience to fill in the humour.

Give it a listen.

Highly recommended.

Tagged: Radio Comedy Monologue Stand-up Autobiographical