Miles Jupp

Miles Jupp performs with the posture of a man who has just been asked an impertinent question at a tedious dinner party. He often takes the stage in a tailored jacket, gripping the microphone stand and letting out a slightly winded sigh before launching into a grievance. His rhythm relies on the tension between his impeccably polite, upper-middle-class delivery and his pure annoyance at the modern world. He will construct a gorgeous, winding, grammatically flawless paragraph just to express his bafflement over how another adult behaves on a train.

Within British comedy, he sits exactly between television acting and Radio 4 broadcasting. He does not try to tear down the establishment; he embodies the establishment, gently shaking his head at it. People watch him to see an educated, thoroughly sensible person be completely defeated by ordinary life.

He gets laughs simply by selecting an unexpectedly devastating adjective instead of raising his voice. The material works best when the stakes are either incredibly low or wildly high. In his tour On I Bang, he applies his flustered, fussing persona to the experience of discovering and surviving a brain tumor. Treating his own mortality with the exact same mild, polite bewilderment he uses to talk about customer service makes the hospital stories feel absurd rather than heavy.

Though he spent his early career acting in the brightly colored children’s show Balamory, his standup operates in a completely different register. He builds an entire hour out of stammering exasperation, one heavily punctuated sigh at a time.