Yahoo News Simon Amstell: Set Free: Things get weird fast in comedian's Netflix special
The thing about Simon Amstell is… nothing. There is no thing. He’s quiet, unassuming, polite.
That’s the thing about Simon Amstell. Just when you think it’s safe to start liking this well-mannered boyish man, he drops a piece of slightly warped logic that kicks sand in the face of your assumptions.
Possibly, as a less-than-committed follower of energy-saving British comedians, you have no assumptions to bring, no knowledge of Amstell to be subverted. That’s OK. Simon Amstell: Set Free, recorded at EartH in Hackney, requires no prior knowledge of a comic best known for his time as host of the pop quiz Never Mind The Buzzcocks, where he succeeded by not being Mark Lamarr, and caring more about the jokes than the music.
Since then, Amstell’s appearance has grown marginally less boyish. He has had therapy, attended an orgy, tackled depression by attending an ayahuasca ceremony in Peru, and done some thinking about his need for validation. “The other night,” he says, “I had a dream that I was in a queue.”
Was he really depressed, or was his internal discomfiture exaggerated in the service of a punchline? It’s hard to say. Certainly, Amstell’s attempt at an eating disorder seems more like constipation, but the understatement of the delivery keeps things in the margins of subversion.
The language is quite precise. “It’s very important not to talk to your parents,” he will say. “Imagine if calves started attaching themselves to human women.” These thoughts are not delivered in the same paragraph, but they are freighted with the same sense of bewildered introspection, and they coax the audience into a place where weirdness is normal and normality is weird.
Does that excuse Amstell’s autism joke? No. Self-deprecating narcissism can take a comedian a long way but, even in a place where prejudices have been turned upside down, that bit misdirects the cruelty.
Simon Amstell: Set Free is on Netflix now.
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