Twenty years ago, Original Pirate Material emerged from Brixton and made a star of Mike Skinner AKA the Streets. Now from another corner of south London comes its near-namesake Accessible Pigeon Material, by Lewisham export Toussaint Douglass. Dry your eyes, mate? OK, Douglass’s compendium of autobiography and bird gags may not reduce you to tears. But it’s an eye-catching hour from an act with a distinctive line in do-things-his-own-way comedy.
Eccentricity is relative, of course. Douglass promises (or should that be threatens?) that pigeons, pigeons and more pigeons will be all we’re getting, and, to stress the point, there’s one circulating the stage strapped to a remote-controlled car. Pigeon facts are then scattered like seed by a man with an outsized zeal for our feathered not-always-friends. But the show soon deviates from the avian theme, towards something more conventional for a standup debut: a “this is me” account of where Douglass comes from and what his life looks like. Dressed “like a croupier” at primary school and reared by his beloved gran, AKA “87-year-old flatmate”, he’s now starting a family with his partner (cue a fine gag about why he can’t use the word “girlfriend”), and still untangling his relationship with his emotionally absent dad.
The latter is embodied by a glove puppet of a boxer, deployed in a comically awkward father-son role play with a member of the audience. The disconnect between macho parent and misfit kid is the scab Douglass keeps picking at in a set that makes peace, finally, with his neurodivergence.
Again, the show leans on one or two familiar structural props to make that point. And not all of its jokes land. But many do (one about easy peelers; another about wanting to die alone), occasionally because dismayed Douglass bellows the punchlines at us over and again until we acquiesce. That’s just what he has to do to get us normies to connect with his dotty way of seeing. It works: after a lifetime of ill-fitting introversion, Douglass has cracked how to make the inside of his mind seem not just accessible, but a very fun place to spend time.
