Louise Mason (MUMBLE COMEDY)
Oh Mumble Comedy, must we play this game again? Oh fine. Here we go then.
Louise Mason is a real person who actually went to review things. The fact that she writes exactly like all the other Mumble Comedy reviewers, who in turn write exactly like Damo Bullen (and we know he exists because he sends us emails claiming to be Napoleon) is purely coincidental. Make no mistake: Louise Mason is a person and she went to see Juliet Meyers.
Mason (I feel dirty) was certainly not sitting there looking for themes or concepts. With Meyers, as with the other things she saw, she recorded what happened like a copper with a notepad. When she tells us that “In a dark, packed out and rather sweaty loft, Juliet Meyers ran through the corridor shouting and “welcome to the stage….Juliet Meyers!” … her baggy black t-shirt with stars, galaxies and orange writing reminded me of Back to the Future” you have to wonder what the internet has done to journalism. With no word limits the prose has become baggier than Ms Meyer’s T-shirt and more interminable than the cosmos depicted on it. Add to this Mason’s penchant for rhetorical questions (“Where will she take us?” “What would a show about being an outsider be without jokes about religion, race, politics and feminism?” “What can a counsellor do without having people to counsel?”) and you have the makings of tortuous reviews.
It’s not her fault, of course. Mason writes (of Nathan Cassidy) the sentence “Peppered with jokes about mid-life crises and his failed relationship, the audience are on his side.” Mason has no idea that she has told us the audience were peppered with jokes. It must be difficult, what with the ongoing headfuck of probably not existing, to keep in mind that a sentence must have a subject. Nor can Mason see the amusing ambiguity of telling us that Joe Rowntree has a “genius free show”. Statements come screaming out of the mist like civilians running from a bomb atrocity; missing verbs, articles, subjects, qualifiers, possessive apostrophes… The horror, the horror.
Mason turns out sentences the way Eastern Europe used to turn out cars: raw, unfinished, unsafe and liable to collapse under the force of a hard stare.
But fuck it, she’s had her free ticket. Well, someone has.
Billy Coconuts