Daniel Kitson can be described with some confidence as a stand-up comedian, but only to the extent that he performs standing up and is on occasion somewhat comedic. A more accurate term might perhaps be ‘storyteller’, or even ‘stand-up philosopher’: the word ‘comedian’, like its etymological cousin, ‘comic’, hardly comes close to capturing the idiosyncratic mixture of anecdote, popular philosophy and pathos which typifies Kitson’s work, and he remains the only comedian this reviewer has experienced live whose intent seems less to make people laugh than to make them think, and who is just as likely to evoke tears as mirth.
The scruffily-bearded Englishman’s work can be roughly divided into two categories. On the one hand, there are the story shows, such as the quietly charming C-90, which Kristy Edmunds had the good sense to bring to last year’s Melbourne International Arts Festival, and The Ballad of Roger and Grace, which Kitson has been performing in the afternoons at this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival. With Kitson taking the role of omniscient third-person narrator, these shows involve nothing more elaborate, or less magical, than the telling of a fictional story in monologue: C-90, for example, is about two lonely senior citizens connected by a library of personalised mix tapes, and Roger and Grace, or so the posters tell me, is a “tale of towering courage, of hearts aching, swollen and broken, of battles, won and lost, both romantic and land-based. And of train travel. And flapjacks.” Then there are the stand-up gigs, such as the work currently under review. While more explicitly autobiographical in content and essayistic in structure, these shows nevertheless share a number of characteristics with the story shows: an interest in wordplay and the manipulation of language, a certain structural intelligence, and the perhaps naïve but emotionally appealing belief that in order to change the world one must start on the level of the mundane and the everyday. Kitson’s story shows are to his stand-up, then, what an author’s fiction is to his non-fiction, his short stories to his essays: the forms are different, but only to a degree, and in any case the two modes of expression remain part of the same overriding project.
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Esoteric Rabbit Blog, 31 March 2008
