Andrew Maxwell. Showtime

Having, once again, confused what I think with what other people think, I arrived at the Arts Centre early, with a view to bagging an optimum seat for Andrew Maxwell’s show ahead of the gadarene rush. No one else, however, seemed to share my concerns, and so I found myself sitting in a largely empty auditorium, waiting for Maxwell, or anyone else, to turn up. I was reminded how small the venue is, and found myself idly counting the chairs. I’ve seen Maxwell play to huge crowds, and while those have been at festivals, he regularly sells out full runs at the Edinburgh festival, so where was everyone? Eventually, the place does fill out, but come the hour there are a few empty seats dotted about, leaving me perplexed that a comic as perceptive, audacious and straightforwardly funny as Maxwell can’t sell a hundred tickets to a show in Norwich.
He doesn’t seem that chuffed either when he emerges on stage, having announced himself as our clown for the evening. Grumpy after a long and fractious car journey, he quickly determines that the stage is too high, as is the stool he’s been given to sit on, his solution being to wrestle one of the empty chairs from the front row, and plonk it unceremoniously onto the stage. “Can you still see all right?” he asks, recovering some of his good humour, but struggles to settle. It’s an uneasy start, compounded by the discovery that trying to get such a small audience to hum isn’t really going to fly – we just don’t have the volume to combat the vaulted ceiling of what Maxwell describes as a dead church. Ironically, it’s some latecomers that are the catalyst for the first proper laugh of the night, filling the front row that must have been bothering him. To their bewilderment, the audience responds to his questioning with a spirited hum, all those rehearsals having paid off, and all of a sudden we were sharing a private joke between a hundred friends.
Inevitably, for a comedian as inquisitive and questioning as Andrew Maxwell, much of his set was given over to Brexit. As an Irishman whose nationality straddles the border between North and South, it’s perhaps no surprise that he finds the leavers’ perspective both worrying and inexplicable. His clear-headed analysis of just how big a problem this is going to be for Ireland was funny, but also illuminating. It’s dispiriting when you need to attend a comedy gig to have something so important properly explained to you, and perhaps the ultimate expression of the woeful state of our politics, but Maxwell does so with extraordinary wit and clarity. Unapologetically furious at the needless mess we find ourselves in, the surety with which he delivers his world view might raise the hackles of those who think otherwise, but there’s no doubting the sincerity of his thinking.
What sets Maxwell apart, however, is his ability to separate the personal from the political, yet hold both contradictory ideas in his head. It is something we all do to some extent - his gift is to hold up a mirror to the silly, contrary way we live day to day, happy to take in the bins for a neighbour whose views we find abhorrent. He spoke tellingly of his new life in Kent, a leaver stronghold where Union Jacks are to be found flying, and folk are only happy when the sea mist obscures the view of France. To love your neighbour, while hating what he thinks, is not hypocrisy, he tacitly argued, it’s the mark of a civilised man. If that doesn’t sound very funny, I can only say that throughout Maxwell’s show, I laughed longer and harder than I have in an age – if I can’t remember quite why, its only because he filled my head with ideas too important and profound to leave much room for anything else.
The recent tragic death of Jeremy Hardy meant one less comedian prepared to engage thoughtfully with issues that genuinely matter, in a sea of comics who talk about hotel room service, greetings cards, toasters, and celebrities, and who do so in much bigger rooms. Maxwell is one of the few still engaging both his brain and his heart, content to ask difficult questions of both himself and his audience. He should be valued for that alone. That he does so by balancing righteous indignation with empathy and humanity is little short of remarkable.