Jo Caulfield: Won't Shut Up!

Jo Caulfield has been in this business for a while, and it shows – for better and for worse. This is a measured, consistent, professional hour of stand up: Caulfield’s observational barbs are expertly aimed, her timing exemplary, her recovery effortless on the few occasions when a joke falls flat.

Yet a faint air of lethargy hangs over this performance – something not helped by an overwhelmingly middle-aged audience. As Caulfield gets underway with a section on the MPs’ expenses scandal, she’s able to reduce the primmer viewers to giggles simply by dropping in the odd swear word – even the banal suggestion that David Miliband should “fuck off” meets with gasps of delighted outrage. And this subject matter has been sucked almost dry by now; Caulfield should really aim higher than yet another joke about the Tory MP whose moat protects him from the wrathful local peasants.

There are some cracking lines, nonetheless. Caulfield does well on the slave labour unblinkingly performed at Tesco’s self-service checkouts, and on domestic drudgery: “My perfect kitchen? I’m not fucking in it!” And there’s some amusing goading of the Scots, the observation that “you can’t tell whether they’re smiling or contemplating suicide” sparking a wave of self-deprecating titters.

Caulfield is married to a Scot, which entitles her to make that joke. It doesn’t, however, quite justify her heavy reliance on the time-honoured useless husband/henpecking wife routines. It goes down well, of course, with couples sharing a wry grin as their quirks are picked out one by one. But it’s all just a little too easy.