[2012096] Mike Wilmot
Mike Wilmot @ The Hunting Lodge
7:30pm, Wed 7 Mar 2012
I’ve got a feeling that I’m pretty hard to please when it comes to Filthy Comedy; I really enjoy a ribald laugh, but once a certain line has been crossed – and it’s usually one where I feel that overt sexism is being used for extremely cheap laughs – I switch right off.
So when I hear that Mike Wilmot – widely regarded as a Quality Filth Merchant – is in town, he was pencilled in nice and early… I was keen to see how an expert straddled that line.
In retrospect, a 7:30 timeslot might have been a bit early for Wilmot – he spends a good twenty minutes wandering back-and-forth moaning about the daylight and the the ferris wheel in his eye-line, and the open bar within The Hunting Lodge meant that front-row patrons were wandering in front of him during this relatively placid period. And I could almost sense that Wilmot himself detected that he was out-of-sorts, and he was desperately trying to drag himself into a more comfortable vein of material.
I don’t know whether it was the receding daylight, or a more settled audience, but suddenly Wilmot lurched into his perception of The Garden – or “Rapey Park”, as he called it – and he was away.
And when he got going… boy, did he bring the filth.
It’s all based around sex, of course, contrasting his near-non-existant spousal interactions with the desperate lunges of youth: “when you’re young, you don’t know what you’re doing, so she’s moist everywhere from the waist down,” he explains, before leaping into a series of arse-licking jokes. And it seems so appropriate that this material is being delivered with minimal eye contact, measured pacing, and a voice like a frog croaking through a sandpaper throat.
It’s not all rude, though – some of Wilmot’s more acerbic material is based around his love/hate relationship with his wife, and – being Canadian (“beavers and freezing”) – his sufferance of the weather comes into it. Punchlines can occasionally come from nowhere, yet always feel right for the joke, and that gravelly voice just works perfectly with the material. Whilst Wilmot’s set this evening felt a little uneven, it’s clear that he’s got the confidence to ease into material too dirty for other comedians to touch… and then wallow in it for our amusement.