David Longley

It’s Sod’s Law that, dispatched to a late Friday night standup gig—spiritual home of the undeveloped sense of humour, where a pint is a mandatory accessory—I arrive five minutes late. With the only available seat being in the front row, I duly prepare for David Longley gut me with his wit for the pleasure of the rabid mob. The blow never falls; Longley passes up the easy kill.

It becomes clear that Longley is a different breed of late-night comic, whose intelligent, well-researched material and confident, unhysterical delivery rebel against his time slot. The only reason he’s on at half eleven at night is that his set is unremittingly filthy: nuns don’t just get roasted in this show – they enjoy it, too.

Longley is on a mission to expose substandard thinking, and the way in which society deludes us, or worse, we delude ourselves. His targets are somewhat predictable: religion, love, alternative medicine and the media are battered over the course of an hour. What sets Longley appart from lesser observational comics is the rigour which he applies to his deconstruction of fuzzy logic; his anecdotes are laid out with a detailed, measured assurance. If the Liverpool Echo hack who unfairly skewered Longley for an insensitive joke made at the height of the Madeline McCann saga had a fraction of the comic’s work ethic, the routine would be robbed of its most convincing argument. Oh well, lessons have been learned; you don’t make fun out of tragedy – leave Everton alone, David.