Andrew O'Neill's Black Magick Fun Hour
What do you get if you cross a heavy-metal playing, cross-dressing, spell-weaving comedian with the Waterfront music venue hosting an Oasis tribute band? The answer turned out to some pretty disparaging remarks from Andrew O’Neill about what was going on downstairs, as he and his loyal audience enjoyed an evening of stand-up comedy, hidden upstairs like a dirty secret.
O’Neill jumped on stage in his civvies to briefly extemporise about his new film career before introducing some spirited support from Altered Feast’s MC, Tom Clutterbuck. Tom is such a personable fellow than any criticism feels mean, but while there was much to like in his routine, the set as a whole was a bumpy ride. We wasn’t helped by the early start, or the constant flow of punters joining the party, but neither did he help himself by offering up three uneven sections – and it did feel like sections. We got remotely controlled weird noises, a spirited defence of political correctness, and a rap taking us through the narrative of Evil Dead II. His timing and delivery while Evil Dead was projected onto a bed sheet was particularly sharp, and the noises were a hoot as far as they went, but his PC commentary felt a little too much like pushing against an open door. Perhaps he was just trying out a bunch of new stuff, which is fair enough, but the shift from one style to another felt a little clunky. Neither straight up comedy nor truly nuts, I couldn’t help thinking that Clutterbuck needs to decide what sort of comedian he is, and then polish that act until it gleams.
There can be no doubt what sort of comic Andrew O’Neill is. Entering stage right, stripped to the waist, smeared in white greasepaint and wearing goat horns, he prowled around the audience invoking spirits from ethereal plains, giving his audience a startling and genuinely unnerving start to the show.
“I’ve of been dabbling in magic”, he says, upon returning to the stage. “As you can see, it has had quite an effect.”
What followed was a hilarious, and frequently fascinating, account of how his belief in the power of magic can shape and influence life. Self-aware enough to undercut his philosophy with self- depreciating humour, he had his audience laughing one minute, only to pause for thought the next. It remained an open question whether these were his literal beliefs, or merely a metaphor for positive thinking, but as he was quick to emphasise, that probably didn’t really matter. What did matter was that, as his mentor Aleister Crowley would have it, we should "Do What Thou Wilt". Not, O’Neill was anxious to point out, in an anarchistic or libertarian sense, so much as fulfilling your own potential. And if that sounds a little preachy rest assured that while a healthy chunk of the set was given over to Crowley’s spiritual philosophy of Thelema, O’Neill also squeezed in the Blue Oyster Cult classic, Don’t fear the Hoover, a song he likes to sings to his cat.
There was also a surprisingly sanguine take on the middle-age he is fast approaching. When he says he’s being doing comedy long enough to be good at it, but also long enough to be sick of it, I got the sense there was more than a grain of truth there. His heroically defiant inclusion of anachronistic material – an impression of Joss Ackland’s Yellow Pages voiceover was indeed spot on – seemed wilfully obscure, while there was a playful mischievousness in the inclusion of Geoff Capes when the routine relied on the audience not knowing who this was. But then, knowledge is something O’Neil has in abundance, and he likes to share. His illustration of the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon through the medium of trampolining was particularly masterful – we must cage them – and was typical of a beautifully constructed and very clever mix of the silly and the profound.
Much of O’Neill’s material relied not so much on subverting expectations in the service of a quick gag, as confirming them. Everyone in the room knew where his extended knock-knock routine was going and it was all the funnier for it. As he wisely pointed out, you always laugh longest and largest when with your friends. His abiding talent is to make his audience feel like he is that friend, and we are sharing a joke, rather than having one delivered.
