STEPHEN
K. AMOS: ALL OF ME
Pleasance
Courtyard, Edinburgh
August, 2006
*****
It is difficult to specify precisely
what makes Amos' 2006 show so nearly perfect. Most comics will delve
into their childhood and family at some point, and offer a glimpse of
what has brought them along the road to who and where they are now.
Amos simply does it systematically, offering a comic autobiography from
his childhood in London as the eldest of several children born to a
Nigerian couple, through his time at university when he desperately
tried to fit in socially, sexual awakening in New York (it took him
until then to realise he was gay? Come on! At college he had been
claiming 1980s soul wimps 5-Star were his cousins!), and eventually
forsaking his legal training to become a full-time funny man. It's not
a particularly unusual or surreal tale; he simply invests it with a
warm, embracing humour, working the audience with just the right
combination of friendliness and teasing so that we bond with him
utterly. As an added twist, he provides his own warm-up act, coming on
in African robes with a simultaneous onstage translator who, for
instance, has to render a few bars of a shosholoza song from Amos into a
Proclaimers number. Before the if.com-eddies award shortlists were
announced last week, there had been strong word about one or two
familiar names who this year had hit perfect comic pitch. I was very
much surprised and disappointed that Amos was not recognised in this
regard.
Written for the Financial
Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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