His audience that night may, in fact, have been made up of people who couldn’t face any more of Kate and Wills on the box or maybe those who just hadn’t been invited to a streeet party. Milton Jones was a worthy distraction from all that pomp and ceremony.

Milton Jones

Cambridge Corn Exchange, April 29

Review by Debbie Davies

IF you check out Milton Jones on Wikipedia he is thus described as “English comedian whose style is based on one-liners, including puns”.

His zany appearance includes loud shirts and a shock of red hair, which he styles to create that unstyled look. He has entered the mainstream comedy circuit much due to his appearances on Mock The Weak. His Lion Whisperer Tour appearance at the Cambridge Corn Exchange on April 29 coincided with the other big gig of the day – the royal wedding.

His audience that night may, in fact, have been made up of people who couldn’t face any more of Kate and Wills on the box or maybe those who just hadn’t been invited to a streeet party. Milton Jones was a worthy distraction from all that pomp and ceremony. His 90-minute act provides an unrelenting stream of the most ridiculous one-liners that probably should wear a bit thin after 10 minutes or so but somehow they just don’t. What happens, in actual fact, is that it creates a humour chain reaction. The silliness of his take-on-the-world is hilarious and his ultra intelligent grasp of word-play means that not everyone gets the punch line at precisely the same moment.

Sections of the audience are shaking with laughter while others need a few more seconds to catch up. When he delivers a line it goes round the audience like a demented and uncoordinated Mexican wave. There were times when the person next to me was laughing uncontrollably and three seconds later, when it suddenly enters someone else’s stream of consciousness, there’s a bit more laughter from somewhere else in the crowd.

It almost becomes an audience battle of intelligence as you start to look out for the dumb people in the third row who just didn’t get that last one and the students to the left of you who get all the historical stuff straight away and break out into loud posh whooping.

His rapport with the audience was just as quick-fire. He asked: “who thinks cycle helmets should be compulsory” and when some brave soul answers “I do” he dishes out the silly, but funny, “well, why aren’t you wearing one now”.

In fact, anyone who manages to combine song lyrics and philosophy has one of those widely intelligent odd-ball minds that mean you are locked up or able to earn a living from the strange workings of the free-flow brain.

He buzzes around the stage like a jack-in the-box, starting the show dressed as ‘Milton’s grandfather’ and he ends it by showing us some drawings that are just plain silly, but we rocked in our seats at the absurdity.

My favorite line of the night: “we don’t know much about Galileo – other than the fact that he was a poor boy from a poor family…”

I guess you had to be there… and if you weren’t, I hope Wills and Kate gave you a few laughs.