Foot’s show, Still Life, begins with an “off-stage announcement” that continues for approximately 10 minutes. It is surely a talent to command a room full of laughter from an audience peering at an empty stage in the dark. “Why rush?” questions Foot, “we should be enjoying every moment in life.”
When he finally enters, it is not through the curtains but through the same door as his audience. The majority of the show is about the show. Foot cleverly explains what is going to happen while simultaneously acting it out.
When Foot gets excited, his voice jumps a couple of octaves and he dances around like a stuttering kid trying to tell a story. He consults hand-decorated cue cards containing “glimpses” into his mind and his jokes. The gags are nonsensical stories, similar to many of the bizarrely entertaining one-liners in The Might Boosh. He ventures into rant so long (about pierce Brosnan owning a cockle sanctuary, for example) that it somehow passes the point of tiresome repetition and emerges out the other side as funny once again.
Perhaps the highlight is Foot’s complete disregard for personal space. Don’t like close talkers? Don’t see Still Life. Foot stands on chairs, goes nose-to-nose with unsuspecting audience members and borderline sexually assaults a male audience member when his extreme alter-ego, Penny, takes to the stage looking strangely like Foot in a $2 paper mask.
But Foot’s genius shines the most when he introduces a toy horse on a stick. Turn it upwards and he’ll speak English. Turn it upside-down and he’ll blurt gibberish. Turn it on it’s side and it’s somewhere between the two. He never falters.
Paul Foot is strange, intense and quite possible insane, but you’ll laugh so hard at his absurdity that the second Still life is over, you’re almost guaranteed to leave with a Foot fetish.
