Yesterday morning, me and my mother went to Diss to go to some shops and also for me to see my dentist for a biannual checkup. The dentist was first, in which I met a girl I'd not seen in years. It's always an odd feeling, knowing that a decade ago I was standing outside her garden gate showing off my Dragonite Pokémon card to her (Dragonite was her favourite Pokémon... jeez, talk about selective memory). The checkup went fine then we headed to the shops. I got some throat lozenges from a chemist (see previous blog entry) then a load of stuff at Morrisons.
One thing I like about Morrisons is their cheap entertainment. Yesterday, I got Rocket Science for £1, Avatar for £5 (as part of a shopping deal, will probably review this later), and the one I'm going to talk about as I've already watched it - Tim Vine: So I Said To This Bloke... . It's a stand up comedy from a comic well-known for cheap, groan-worthy rapid-fire puns.
As funny as the stand-up was, its 65 minute duration felt more like three hours. Ten-second puns really don't do well so consecutively - Vine is funnier when he's co-hosting shows or similar (he's a frequent Dictionary Corner resident on Countdown) and hence isn't the centre of attention.
One thing I disliked about it was the amount of songs. He's not a singer; I won't pick on him for that though (again, see last blog entry). None of the songs were actual, singable, proper songs though... well, excluding one, "Alarm Bells", which I've seen him perform before but which is actually rather funny so eeh.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcFd5j1cios]
Other songs included one in which he was allergic to choruses, so he'd sing about the allergy in the verses then cough, splutter and look very ill in the choruses, and one about his trusty metronome, which was actually enjoyable for about twenty seconds... then the song just repeated and, with the joke behind the song, sped up.
There were a couple of hugely tedious gags in the show. The worst was called Pen Behind The Ear. In it, Vine attempted to throw a pen, backwards, at around shoulder height and land it behind his ear (and have it stay there). To do this, he had a tube of around 20 pens. He finally managed it after having failed with all the pens four full times, each requiring him to bend over, pick them all up, and put them in the tube. All of this was to a monotonous "Pen Behind The Ear" chant. You could hear the audience's laughs slowly dying down with every refill, and the resulting cheer when he FINALLY managed it more one of relief than admiration.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pwbQvJDFzQ]
But, in general, it was enjoyable to watch. Certainly worth the £2. It would just have been better in small doses - even Vine himself continuously joked about what he was putting his audience through, and indeed one of his very first jokes notified the crowd of the level of regret they might start suffering very, very quickly.