John Tothill: This Must Be Heaven review – joyful look at earthly pleasures brings us closer to standup paradise

The Guardian

2 days ago

Both his previous shows having almost killed him, the bar for success is set low for John Tothill at this year's fringe. But you wouldn't bet against this cat with nine lives high-achieving his way to award recognition this year, so confident is his comic voice, so frothy and delightful the hour we spend in his company. Rare is the standup with nary a grump, not a whisper of self-importance nor a scintilla of cynicism – just effervescent joy taken in our company, the world and so many wonderful things in it.
And erudition, too, and surprising ideas to undergird the giddy comedy. An act much given to sweeping historico-cultural theses attends in This Must Be Heaven to gluttony, its distinction from greed, and how it challenges the individualism of our age. Tothill's case study is the Georgian-era guzzler Edward Dando, who ate oysters by the barrowload and refused to pay for them. What a hero, argues our host – at least once he's dispensed all the absolutely essential gossip that forms the first third of the show.
How much of that is extemporised, who knows, as the Essex man riffs ecstatically on how his audience is dressed, on a trip to the Margate Crab Museum, and on a dread experience he recently had gigging aboard a cruise ship. ('It made the House of Lords look like Love Island.') No one is better at making this stuff seem as if it's tripping apropos of nothing off his tongue, and few bring to it such vivacity.
A buffet interaction on that fateful cruise gives the show its moral, which is to be grateful not grizzly at the abundance life puts our way. You might ascribe that life-affirming credo, shot through the entire act, to the most recent of Tothill's brushes with death: he gives us a lurid account here of the exploded appendix that up-ended his 2024 fringe. Perhaps the 'stupid and immature' (his doctor's words) recklessness that risked ending it all is the flipside of Tothill's zest for life, this committed self-indulger's paradoxical negation of the self. Here's to him safely surviving the fringe this month; he's certainly thriving at it.
At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 24 August
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