Pierre Novellie: a young stand-up with a refreshingly snooty slant on life

Pierre Novellie’s Covid-delayed show went down well at the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe, and it is not hard to see why. It is pretty much as slick an hour of observational stand-up as you’re likely to see all year, delivered with seductive confidence by an up-and-coming millennial comedian – late of The Mash Report and The Frank Skinner Radio Show, and now on his first UK tour – with a refreshingly snooty slant on life.

It’s called Why Can’t I Just Enjoy Things?, and that’s the nub of it: essentially, a disquisition on the things in life that irk Novellie, or that he simply cannot get as “into” as others, seasoned with a generous dash of: But am I missing the point? Or is everyone else just too easily pleased?

In fact, the latter question dominates, as befits the “high-status” stance of this dapper, well-spoken young fellow, his velvet jacket as burnished as his facial hair, his accent betraying just the faintest, imperious hint of his native South Africa. He casts his net commendably wide, and the results are often rewarding.

There’s a strong section on the time he went to see The Play that Goes Wrong, entertainingly venting his outrage at the general public’s indiscriminate approach to consuming snack food, and at the Spaniard in the audience who gave a running commentary on the endless concatenation of (necessarily deliberate) slips. He also cleverly sets up a joke about the time he was with a girlfriend in Bruges, she made the serious error of asking him what he was thinking, and he made the positively grievous faux pas of answering her with complete candour: that answer is itself terrific, and the joke turns out to be a lit, invisibly smouldering firework that fully ignites much later, when you least expect it. It’s nicely done, as is his really quite bold take on the parents of his adoptive nation insistently telling their children to polish off their food because of “the starving children in Africa”.

Where the set falls down is on a slight over-fondness for bringing in bodily excretions of various kinds – Novellie is far too clever a fellow to dwell on such lowest-common-denominator yuck, and it’s also at odds with his debonair demeanour. Moreover, some of even the better material impresses and entertains without quite meticulously targeting the funny-bone, and the pay-off – which I won’t spoil here – seals the whole thing with what is fast, in stand-up, becoming a rather too-familiar bow (however neatly Novellie does, in fairness, tie it here).

At the start, he bemoans the fact that we essentially live in “a six-out-of-10 world”, going on to mention how hopeless three-star reviews are for comedians, and bringing in an enjoyable little riff on two (other) markedly different papers and their critics. Well, if pressed to use that scale I’d say this show as it stands is a seven – not quite (with apologies to Mr N) in four-star territory, but missing it by only a whisker. Novellie is smart, talented, and I suspect will learn fast.

At Soho until Feb 8 (sohotheatre.com), then touring nationwide until Nov (pierrenovellie.com).