Candid, bawdy and regularly close to the knuckle, John Bishop had a 3,000-strong Dubai World Trade Centre audience in fits of laughter and spasms of incredulity on Thursday night at his one-night-only stop-off gig in the UAE.
The 47-year-old Liverpudlian used the event to work on new stage material for his upcoming autumn tour in the UK, threw in the odd reference to the modern metropolis Dubai has become in his lifetime, fell back on some of his older filial-observational material, and touched lightly on the current madness of Europe — with bearded ladies winning Eurovision and the United Kingdom Independence Party (Ukip) claiming a shock national election victory.
Given Bishop was honing new material, it wasn’t surprising to see him occasionally groping for the next anecdote in the set and randomly bouncing off different sketches like a pinball at times. But as the gig progressed, especially after the interval, his story-telling became more refined and his punchlines sharper.
Mixed in with a lot of saccharine adoration and adulation for Dubai and its achievements, the emirate felt the ironic jab of Bishop’s jib on more than one occasion. He praised the emirate’s main mall for perfectly catering to women and men. The women, he said, can lose themselves for hours in all the amazing shops and coffee houses. While for the blokes, there’s fish. “And we all know how much blokes love to stare at fish for hours and hours,” he joked.
The Palm was another satirical target. After praising the vision for building the manmade island and marvelling that such a concept wouldn’t even get past the receptionists at a council office in the UK, he said: “But during the planning stages, why didn’t anyone say, ‘Don’t you think we might need two roads coming in and out, say if we were to hold an event with loads of fireworks?’.”
Playing to a predominantly British expatriate audience, Bishop jibed that those that had made the decision to migrate to the emirate lived in a “little bubble of success”, before moving onto personal anecdotes that revolved around the luxury of flying first-class with a personal shower and performing a private gig for low-cost carrier Ryannair by being flown out in the Private Leer Jet reserved mainly for the airline’s CEO Michael O’Leary. The irony was lost on a few.
But Bishop’s most honed routines stemmed from his distinctively curmudgeonly view of married and family life. The filial sketches also proved to be the most divisive with the crowd; the apotheosis of which was when the comedian claimed that all long-term wives are inevitably viewed by their husbands as “Christmas trees without any glitter.” The gag was greeted predominantly by roars of belly-laughter, with a smattering of disapproval.
The roving, relaxed conversational tone of Bishop’s stand-up is a style few can pull off. But he does. And his unique Everyman view of the world regularly struck a sweet spot with the Dubai crowd.
