Marcel Lucont: Sexual Metro

“I am a nihilist”, proclaims Marcel Lucont, when the can-can girls have disappeared and the accordion music has died down. Wearing a lounge suit and a turtleneck, but no shoes, he looks debauched in a way that nobody could fail to recognise as French. He sips vin rouge and has a good line in shrugs and pouts. His jokes are the kind you’d expect from a parody of a French nihilist, either sordid - about his undiscriminating success as a lover, or snobbish - about how shit Britain is. Sometimes they’re both, like the one about the girls in Espionage (just like the toilets in Espionage: engaged, vacant, or disabled).

Lucont (alter-ego of Englishman Alexis Dubus) can derive comedy from the mere pronunciation of a phrase. He talks about “dismontling” the Eiffel Tower, and how the English like to “frrrolique in ze snow”. But too often Lucont’s louche Frenchness masks weak material. Undeserving lines of the "it's funny because it's true" variety get a laugh because, let’s face it, being French is intrinsically hilarious.

Best is the extract Lucont reads from his autobiography, a description of how he lost his virginité — with a Rive Gauche prostitute, of course. This has some brilliant lines, and Dubus' delivery is always spot-on. But the material isn’t quite good enough to cover up for the fact that this is basically a series of frog jokes. Lucont is a good character, but it’s all a bit too easy – like Monty Python’s bit about the elderberries, only stretched out to an hour.