At the heart of Simon Amstell’s intelligent set lies a contradiction. The show’s message is to accept people as they are — you might not like them, but, hey, you are not going to change them, so, as the title says: “Do nothing.” Yet throughout his fluid performance, the Bafta-nominated TV presenter and comedian urges his audience to act spontaneously, because, as he stresses, everyone’s going to die. Which could be interpreted as a resounding “Do something.”
Whatever. Amstell’s engaging storytelling skills, together with his angst-ridden persona and keen sense of the absurd help him to extract humour from positive and negative alike, and it is hard not to warm to this “anxious Jew who needs love” as he describes himself.
He whizzes through tales of loneliness, gay love, lust and loss, all of which are shot through with reflections on the celebrity culture of which he is a part.
He is not afraid to joke at his obsession with seeking meaning in everything. He recalls quizzing an osteopath on his bad posture. “I said: ‘My parents divorced when I was 13. Is it because of that?’ He said: ‘No, it’s because of your legs — you’ve got tight tendons.’”
Amstell’s Jewish family are, indeed, at the core of his dark humour. Recounting how the non-Jewish partner of a close relative was not invited to his grandfather’s birthday party, he says of his family, with heavy irony: “We mustn’t judge them — it’s because they have a strong belief in racism.”
