Review: Ian Stone is Keeping it Together, The Comedy Store

Review: Ian Stone is Keeping it Together, The Comedy Store

Summary

Rating

80

Excellent

Whatever your pet peeve in life, Ian Stone is here to help you see the funny side in a two hour show of solid laughs that won’t disappoint.

It’s a very wet and cold Monday night in November and we’re being warned of a severe cold snap on the way – surely a recipe for snow and the ensuing infrastructure misery that Britain does best. What better way to spend the evening than warming up your laughing muscles with comedy from a man that knows how to turn misery into mirth.  In fact tonight’s woeful weather is the kind of scenario that you could imagine comedian Ian Stone platforming in his show Ian Stone is Keeping it Together, a fantastic evening of relentless laughs in which nothing is too mundane or too politically sensitive to be made funny. 

With Stone at (a very youthful) 61, and with that show title, this could easily have been an observational comedy gig for grumpy old men who think things were better when they were younger. But Stone takes no prisoners. Sure, he has his contemporary targets (social media, Liz Truss, having to rate his parking experiences) that hit home, but the decade when he grew up (the seventies) takes the hits too. Ian claims the seventies were grim and chooses cheese as the medium to illustrate his point, with a gag that won the first half of the show for me, though the second half, which was less personal and more political, was even funnier. On the way between the two, Stone zig zags deftly through the seemingly impossible territory of political minefields (the election, Nazis, genocide, the war in Gaza) and personal tragedies (the death of his mum and his Dad’s noisy porn addiction) never once taking a wrong turn. When he combined his reflections on health and safety with the woes of Brexit, I laughed harder than I have done in a long time. Stone embodies what we do best in Britain: recognise when something is awful and find comfort in finding it funny. 

He’s clearly a guy that knows his craft and there are no awkward moments in this show. From the minute he arrives on stage he is at ease and so are his audience, who are involved but never humiliated. He knows what he thinks and he’s sure of the quality of his material and his delivery. This is because he has had plenty time to craft every line. This performance is sadly one of the last of his current tour which started at the Edinburgh Fringe and which has taken him to seventeen different venues including tonight. However there are four dates still left (Tring, Cambridge, Luton and Birmingham) so if you’re local to those places (and even if you’re not) you’ll be richly rewarded for stepping out into the cold November night to get there!

The show might be called Keeping it Together but if you’re anything like me and the guy sitting next to me, you’ll laugh so hard you won’t be keeping it together at all, and you’ll feel all the better for it. 

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Written and Performed by: Ian Stone

Ian Stone is Keeping it Together continues on a UK Tour. Further information and booking are available here.