THERE’S a lot to be said for slouching over a barstool, alcohol seeping through every crack and recording otherwise unrepeatable gems of wit and wisdom (yours and anyone else’s within slurring distance). That’s how Chris McEvoy has put together his material for Hollow, a searingly funny stand-up comic routine on the relationship between life and the Electrolux (both suck, and not very well at that).
Call him a Baudelaire, a Lenny Bruce, a Charles Bukowski (or even an Ian Fraser in his leaner years) for the Nineties. Whatever the appellation, McEvoy can be rated as one of the finer species of Yams (young, angry men) calling themselves comedians, and the latest in an ignoble ancestry of barflies who have found veritas in vino, truisms in tequila and humour in that incurable hangover known as life.
He is also at the helm of a growing trend in South Africa towards stand-up comedy, otherwise known as poor person’s theatre. This genre — unlike traditional theatre with its multiple workforce and heavy overheads — requires only balls, brains and a sharp sense of timing for effective delivery.
Even though he has more than a passing predilection for projectile vomiting and the sound of his own farts, McEvoy manages to stroke the bone (even though his wrist often tells him it has a “headache”) of mating games, “mediacrity”, existentialism, depression, bestiality, Rustlers Valley and other ailments commonly recognised as symptoms of being Bored in the RSA. He also does a mean impersonation of a string bean in an impromptu ode to his favourite punching bags — hippies and other herbivores. And you can’t help respecting the insights of a man who tells his audience that he subscribes to the Mail & Guardian in order to get a newspaper every three weeks.
But, beneath his gawky frame and unblinking eyes which never quite connect with the audience, lurks an inveterate romantic. In fact, his routine reminds me of one of the more lucid lines from the 1970s cult film Dazed and Confused: “If these are the best years of my life, then I might as well kill myself.”