Sean Lock

Assembly Rooms

Brian Logan
Tuesday October 2, 2007
The Guardian

Sean Lock is an old hand at stand-up, and has surely run the gamut of punters' responses in his time. But this was a first: 20 minutes into his show, a booze-addled young woman copiously vomited. Lock gamely tried to surf the startled reaction as the woman's neighbours scattered and ushers sought to coax the barely conscious culprit from the theatre. "Well, this has certainly created a special atmosphere," he joked.

Lock, though, must have been grateful to the bilious interruption for loosening up a reserved crowd. Post-puke, he disgorged a crack set's worth of deadpan gags and suburban surrealism. The 15 Storeys High star, with his beige suit and take-it-or-leave-it delivery, isn't the highest-octane of comics but the quality of the joke-writing is irresistible. And Lock's shtick, which combines observational comedy and absurdism to produce something more subversive than either, is very much his own.

The set-ups are workaday, as when Lock notices the parental advice on his daughter's Finding Nemo DVD ("contains mild peril") and devises scenarios that better fit that phrase. But few comics would devise scenarios as poetically silly as Lock's. His comedy is about taking ideas to their illogical conclusion, as with a routine about Walt Disney's supposed cryogenic hibernation, which sees Lock leave a lifetime's worth of pointless answering machine messages to annoy Walt when he is finally unfrozen.

With jokes that exploit the incongruity between his blokeishness and his loopy imagination, Lock has thrown up a touring show to turn heads - and, on this evidence, the occasional stomach, too.