Jeromaia Detto: Giuseppe’s Love Quest comedy review – Quest for a giggle
Jeromaia Detto’s joyfully ridiculous clowning turns audience confessions into a daft comedy experience
Jeromaia Detto’s particular brand of clowning involves taking a silly idea, putting it through the silliness stretching machine, sprinkling it with silly salt, then taking it for a ride down Silly Street. Giuseppe’s Love Quest is no exception to this very silly, and very successful, rule.
Giuseppe has never been in love and so he needs the audience to tell him how it feels by sharing their experiences, memories and hugs. Not everyone will warm to him, who frankly has never met an Italian stereotype he hasn’t leaned into, but Detto’s crowd know what they’ve signed up for. Their responses come thick and fast: in all my time at comedy shows, I’ve never seen an audience filling in the call-backs before the performer can get to them and it is genuinely a thing of absolute beauty to see how involved and engaged the crowd is.
‘If you keep laughing, I’ll keep doing it,’ says Giuseppe at the point where we’re laughing so hard at his tongue-yodelling nonsense that it almost feels like a threat. The key to Detto’s art is that he makes this look easy: it most assuredly is not. This deceptively simple show is both an abs workout and a total laugh, particularly recommended for the heartsore, the weary or anyone who just wants to sit and have a giggle.
Jeromaia Detto: Giuseppe’s Love Quest continues at The Bally at Gluttony until March 15.