Soho Theatre Live: Rhys James

Rhys James wants you to know he is not one of those earnest YouTube spoken-word artists, even if he does spend a chunk of this set performing ironic beat poetry. At twenty-five, the fast-talking comic is fully engaged in a mid-twenties crisis, looking too young to buy spray paint but feeling entirely qualified to condescend to everyone around him. Filmed at London’s Soho Theatre for Comedy Central UK, the set, which is a shortened television cut of his touring show Forgives, targets everything from the entitlement of baby boomer parents to the absurd logistics of veganism and the evolutionary laziness of giant pandas.\n\nAt this stage in his career, James was transitioning from a prolific Twitter writer to a television panel show regular, but his live work remained hyper-verbal and structured with immense precision. His material relies on aggressive overanalysis, whether he is deconstructing the mechanics of a bad shower head, explaining why firefighters no longer rescue cats from trees, or reading a mock-serious letter to his future forty-year-old self. There is a calculated prickliness to his delivery, balanced by a willingness to deconstruct his own gags as they happen, ensuring his youthful arrogance is always the ultimate butt of the joke.