Phil Nichol: 8 Nights Only

“So we walked past the midget Hitler into the Cock Ring,” begins one of Phil Nichol’s more outlandish anecdotes. This is clearly a man who likes a mental party and unsurprisingly has spent most of the week in Amsterdam, home of the aforementioned Cock Ring – a club, not a tool for delaying ejaculation.
Seeing him on stage though, you wonder whether he really needs to be off his face on hallucinogens and high-grade marijuana to have a good time because he seems to be having the best party of his life. He has the energy of a coked up ADHD sufferer who can’t find his Ritalin.

The show is largely comprised of gay jokes, although there’s a little room at the start for impersonations of hard-arsed Londoners and Scots, a little Jazz ballet and a beautiful take on the comic’s Christian father. But it is stories involving Nichol’s questionable heterosexuality that provide the best and most animated depictions of hilarity.

This is tasteless but not bigoted humour. As he twists and bounds around the Stand’s tiny stage there’s not a hint of malice, just a lot of intensely enthusiastic story-telling and the occasional piece of simulated felatio.

In the hands of a less manic comedian, the material might get tired quickly, but Nichol’s adventures have enough energy, range, detail and self-deprecation to maintain an hour of roaring laughter.

Ending on his almost famous masterpiece “I’m the only gay Eskimo (in my tribe),” Nichol succeeds in getting the whole room singing along and their farewell wave of applause sends him pogoing around the stage. About as charmingly tasteless as it gets, this performance is pretty much perfect.