Gina Yashere - Live In Colour Stand Up Review

By Owain Paciuszko / December 5, 2011

rating: 3

To be honest with you, I was only aware of Gina Yashere's stand-up through Mock The Week's truncated round in which comedians offer a snippet of material on a topical, er, topic. It's a Variety Pack approach to stand-up and I was curious to see how Yashere would develop her material when not limited to a brief 2 minute slot. She began this routine engaging with the front row, which, whilst I was partially terrified being on the front row myself, offered some morbid entertainment as a couple had walked past me before the performance's start bickering, the lady snapping at her husband; "How many times have I told you?! Don't get front row seats for comedy!" They managed to avoid Yashere's attention in the first half. Fortunately Yashere's style is broad and chatty, like an entertainingly opinionated friend, and she isn't there to pick on anybody. However one of her early bits about not understanding the music of today, old school rap vs contempoary rap, caused, for me, an uncomfortable moment with her choice of the word 'retarded' and the ensuing impressions of current rappers. Fortunately her material moves along from subject to subject quite quickly, and she used anecdotes about meeting her father again for the first time since she was three to explore the idea of her 'roots' and feeling somewhat intimidated on recent trips to Nigeria, her comparison of British 'thugs' to Nigerian thugs was very funny, likewise her thoughts regarding her childhood attitude and how children are now lead to a great routine involving flashers. The first half of her show climaxed with a routine that the t-shirts describe as 'toilet ninja', and it was the comedic highlight of the show, her delightfully graphic mime and then vivid description of how the ageing process has slightly interfered with her 'toilet ninja' abilities was splutteringly hilarious. Which made it all the more of an uphill struggle for her once the interval had cut into her momentum, and it was difficult for her to again reach the heights of that particular routine. Indeed her final piece about animals was something of a let down, though her look at black attitudes when a pet has died compared to white attitudes was pretty funny, and brought out a morbid streak in Yashere's humour that cropped up when she earlier imagined that, if she had kids and they had been out looting during the riot she would have punished them by setting them on fire outside of the stores they robbed. Part of the issue with that closing routine, and some other bits that fell a little flat, were their tabloid nature, feeling scraped too neatly from the pages of the Metro, and lacking anything beyond what one might expect on Mock The Week. Far more successful was an early routine exploring Yashere's fear of flying (or as she put it her "fear of flying, then not flying") and using crash statistics websites to rule out any potentially life-threatening airlines. It was interesting that a later routine, about her mother not letting her go out on any school trips as a child 'in case she died', featured her mother pulling out a scrapbook of school bus crashes, though any link between the two sets of neuroses was left for the audience to divine. All in all, Yashere is a personable, chatty and energetic comedian, she has an engaging and often deceptively casual style that occasionally means she can really catch you off guard with something that has you burst out laughing. Her strong point though is when she looks into her own life rather than the news for inspiration, and these observations stand head and shoulders above the more topical material. A fun, if uneven, performance. Gina Yashere is on tour across the world now, find dates at: http://www.ginayashere.com/shows/