It’s opening night and Tom Furniss is dressed for an afternoon bike ride through a leafy park.  He is attempting to take us for a random kind of ride. Mum tells me it’s an ice cream vendor’s outfit, and this makes sense since he does indeed give us one. An ice cream that is. 

Because he is charming and interesting, I find myself wanting to laugh more. He has talent, but much of his act centres on reading excerpts from his ‘literary work’:  a collection of miniscule stories, so tiny that they do not usually exceed a sentence and always end rather unexpectedly.

Gore. Sure. A few nods to racism; well, what comedian wouldn’t these days? Before we can take a peek into his literary aspirations he opens with a fantasy involving a woman so consumed with lust that in her haste to remove her shirt she accidentally rips out her aureole.  I suppose a dash of sexist sadism might as well get its air time.

There are moments when he really does shine, such as his (actually true?) story about being beaten up. He is still able to work in his quirkiness and gets the whole audience laughing with him. That’s the side of Tom Furniss I’d like to know more about.

Having said that, remember, he’s young, it’s opening night and he’s obviously got a lot of material to play with. Keep playing it Tom.  
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Having seen Tom Furniss in the 2011 V48 Hours Grand Prize-winning film, The Child Jumpers – a hilarious little mockumentary about a group of guys who jump over small children for fun – I am already endeared to this disarming, if slightly geeky, young comedian.

When he arrives on stage at the Cavern Club with his pants pulled up a fraction too high by his braces and his red bow tie, he is just so cute, I want to invite him home for Sunday tea, in a completely maternal way of course! He opens by asking the audience to imagine him in a pre-entrance fantasy romp with a waitress out in a luxurious greenroom… stop right there! It’s wrong on so many levels! This could be my son …

But wait a minute, it is my son; valiantly taking the stage while Tom hands out the ice-creams. I think he thought he was going to hand out the ice creams, what a cruel trick! Good on him though, having a go with Tom’s trusty book of dreadful jokes, and his hands aren’t even shaking. Such a brave, clever, talented boy … but who am I reviewing here?

Back to the main attraction. Tom regales us with his ideas for ‘chippy packet’ jokes, his attempts at becoming a great writer of short stories (most of which fitted on a post it note) and his completely bizarre movie pitches, the potential of which are sadly lost on PJ.

It’s enough to make your hair curl, but he is so charmingly kooky and left-field, and his delivery so earnest and deadpan – he so genuinely believes he’s going to go places – that you just have to laugh, and the audience does, in bucket loads.

His material is very original and he has a delightful way of making the mundane totally insane. What I love about him is that he has such sincerity in his delivery. A story about something as lightweight as a supermarket purchase can be endowed with the gravity of a great philosophical dilemma, and the fact that he genuinely believes it is so funny!

This is his debut solo stand up show and it’s hard to believe. He seems like an old hand, completely comfortable in his onstage persona and never faltering for a second. His humour is so off-beat, that half the time I have no idea why I’m laughing like a demented banshee, but I am and so, I’m relieved to see, is the rest of the Cavern Club.

His 2012 Billy T nomination is well deserved and I’m sure he will go places, bless him! 

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