REVIEW Joe Wells Doesn’t Want To Do Political Comedy Any More via Zoom from The Spring Arts Centre, Havant : 'Frequently hilarious'

This performance was intended to be an actual, physical show, but the announcement of the second lockdown, forcing all venues to close again, put paid to that.

However, Joe Wells was reluctant to put off this already-postponed show and decided to press on with this final ever performance of ...Doesn’t Want To Do Comedy Any More.

Wanting some kind of audience feedback and interaction he opted to do it via Zoom rather than a one-way livestream – Joe is at The Spring, as always intended, but the stalls sre empty and the audience are in their own homes.

Anyone who has had the pleasure of a large-scale Zoom chat will know they rarely run smoothly, and so it is here, with some of the ‘audience’ clearly more familiar with the set up than others.

It also allows an interesting insight into your fellow audience members’ homes (if they leave their cameras on) – at least two people knit their way through the show (good multitasking!), and one lady wanders off halfway through to go and watch TV which could be clearly heard through the microphone she left running.

Joe wonders aloud if the latter is ‘the ultimate heckle.’

Although Joe has done a smattering of gigs since the first lockdown ended, this is the first time he has attempted this show in full since March.

Anyone familiar with Joe’s work will know his stand-up has typically been fiercely political (previous show titles include: I Hope I Die Before I Start Voting Conservative; 10 Things I Hate About UKIP).

There is indeed a smattering of political comedy in the opening section as he explains how never-ending rows over Brexit at home and the rise of Trump in the US led to his disillusionment, giving the show its title.

But this show is more of a means for the Portsmouth comic to examine and reframe his own life following the discovery two years ago that he is autistic.

Given the show was written in the first half of 2019 and much has changed since then, Joe acknowledges this at the start – including the bizarre experience of a clip about his ‘non-autistic brother’ going viral over the summer and how the Mail Online badgers him and his family to be part of a story they are doing on it, whether they want to participate or not.

There’s recurring gags about hand-sizes, his obsession with penguins, his mum’s pet rats, and the neurotypical habit of making eye contact.

As the show looks at what it means to be neurodiverse, Joe, while still very interesting, acknowledges that the gag-rate drops towards the end, but then wickedly undercuts it with a very funny joke – showing a graph on the relationship between entertainment value for the audience, catharsis for the performer and ‘where the awards are.’

The message that ‘difference is strength’ is a powerful one, and while that in itself isn’t inherently funny, in Joe’s hands, it is frequently hilarious.

With a talented comic it’s hard to tell if ‘mistakes’ are genuine, but Joe does appear to forget his final pay-off, which ultimately leads to a surreal coda of him eating a tin of unlabelled fruit salad on his tech’s backstage camera.

It’s a fitting end to this most unusual of gigs.