Part Troll

Bill Bailey treats a MIDI keyboard like a comedic tool of mass disruption. He treats musical genres not as background noise, but as structures waiting to be stripped down and mocked. There is a deep-seated nerdiness to his stage setup, which is cluttered with synthesizers, guitars, and a projection screen, allowing him to jump from a political rant to a deadpan parody of Kraftwerk without dropping his casual West Country cadence.

Filmed at the Hammersmith Apollo in London, the 2004 show caught Bailey at a career high point. He had just wrapped up his role as the long-suffering Manny Bianco on the sitcom Black Books and was a fixture on British television panel shows like Never Mind the Buzzcocks and QI. Part Troll took the momentum of that television success and channeled it into a sprawling tour. The live show relied heavily on MIDI technology to trigger visual gags on a screen behind him, marrying high-tech production with old-school stand-up.

The show’s centerpieces are highly musical and deeply silly. He maps the Scale of Evil by pairing musical notes with images of historical dictators, culminating in a jab at singer Chris de Burgh. For Drum ‘n’ Bush, Bailey samples speeches by George W. Bush over a booming drum and bass track. The most famous segment features Bailey and three colleagues dressing in black as a German electronic group called Augenblick, performing a translation of The Hokey Cokey. When he steps away from the instruments, he spends his time overanalyzing the logical flaws of classic three-men-in-a-pub jokes or arguing with a car rental company over what constitutes an Act of God.