Sue Perkins: The Eternal Shame Of Sue Perkins comedy review – Engaging and upbeat
This showbiz veteran chases bountiful laughs while unburdening herself and her troubled mind
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With Sue Perkins returning to stand-up for the first time in a good few years as a borderline national treasure, you might expect an evening of droll anecdotes about The Great British Bake Off and hosting Just A Minute. Perhaps her Taskmaster experience? She opens cosily enough, with genially chummy jabs at her comedy partner Mel Giedroyc and a deliberately exhaustive recollection of the innuendo that the pair squeezed into the hit baking show. The longest story in Perkins’ two-hour set is devoted to her headstrong efforts to home an injured Bolivian street dog. And she playfully introduces the contrivance of occasionally being mistaken for Susan Perkins, 1978 Miss America and sweetheart for confused good old boys questioning their search results in an indeterminate part of the States.
However, even these two routines contain stings in the tail. And Perkins lays bare her serious physical health issues and neurodiversity with exceptional candour and defiant, self-lacerating wit, even after being preyed upon by varying degrees of criminality and facing scandalous exposure by the tabloid press. Persecuted by the incessant twin monologues of her latent Catholicism (delivered, naturally enough, as a judgemental Irish nun) and her calories tracking app (its normally emotionless AI driven to escalating shit fits by her snacking), The Eternal Shame Of Sue Perkins is a highly revealing insight into a troubled mind.
Engaging and upbeat, even as she acts out her bewildered lowest ebb, Perkins’ commitment to chasing the laughs, taking a deep dive into NHS statistics for foreign objects lodged up rectums for example, is genuinely impressive. A judicious edit of the Bolivia tale and another, chunky account of identity fraud wouldn’t be remiss. But the catharsis of Perkins unburdening positively radiates from the stage.
Sue Perkins: The Eternal Shame Of Sue Perkins is on tour until Saturday 11 April; reviewed at King’s Theatre, as part of Glasgow International Comedy Festival; picture: Steve Ullathorne.