Tweedy’s Massive Solo Show is a fun-filled piece of classic clowning, with all the fabulous customary features: back-and-forth chase slapstick, scarf juggling, impressive paper manipulation, a range of circus balancing acts, magic tricks, and a whole lot more.
After receiving a letter from the King requesting Tweedy use his magician skills to replace the missing Union Jack flag, a scene of puppet fun and unabashed toilet humour ensues, heightening the raucousness of children’s laughter and demonstrating the show’s skill in effectively appealing to the genres of humour and pure silliness that makes its audience laugh the loudest.
The show was filled with child-like wonder and absurdity, with an iron for a dog, and a mop as another mystery pet. This captures the youthful experience of being naive to the world, and it therefore seeming rather bizarre, with Tweedy’s mop suddenly following unknown laws of physics in a feat of amusing physical comedy.For me, the paper manipulation tricks are the most impressive piece of magic in the show, though the block stack balancing comes in close second by the time he’s balancing it on his head with the iron atop it.
In this context, featuring the Apple virtual assistant Siri felt unnecessary and comically weak compared to the rest of the show- especially for the sake of the dated gag that the virtual assistant didn’t understand the speaker – a mundane reality that hasn’t been funny for about 15 years.
Kindness, empathy, and compassion are core to what it means to be a clown. Unfortunately, in a moment that is a bit more Punch and Judy than clown comedy, Tweedy force-feeds his monkey puppet a flag while the monkey begs him to stop — in Tweedy’s words “traumatising” him, coming off as uncaring and callous. It would have been far more comedically rewarding to present the monkey as a willing but hesitant participant. However, the rest of the magic flag creation scene was classic sophomoric humour that was wildly successful with younger audience members.
As such, the few flaws mentioned don’t necessarily drag the show down, rather they prevent it from soaring as something truly spectacular, which was the path of the rest of the performance. The show delivers on its promise of “increasingly absurd situations,” and I thoroughly enjoyed seeing him face the conundrums caused by mischievous props.
Tweedy’s Massive Solo Show is running until 30 August (not 24) at Udderbelly at Underbelly, George Square. Buy tickets here.
Image by Michael Aiden, provided to The Student as press material.
