Tim Vine – Stand-Up DVD Reviews

Tim Vine is a brilliant stand-up comedian whose shows are crammed full of rapid-fire gags, mostly based on clever wordplay and puns, along with amusing props and silly songs. He even held the Guinness World Record for the most jokes told in an hour (499!), and has picked up the award for the funniest joke at the Edinburgh Fringe on a couple of occasions.

He’s also one of the few stand-up comedians who are still releasing DVDs, and his latest one, Breeeep!, came out in late November. So naturally I bought it to add to my collection, and figured it was a good excuse to go through all of his previous releases as well. None of this is sponsored or gifted of course, I just enjoy his comedy.

Every show lasts between 60-70 minutes, and all of his DVDs have extra features, including audio commentaries in most cases and some video diaries. Plus there are other jokes, sketches, songs and short comedy films, sometimes starring his support act John Archer and other friends. I much prefer his stand-up routines to his comedy films to be honest, but they do have some amusing moments and are still nice to see out of curiosity.

Unlike other comedians I’ve reviewed, however, Tim’s shows don’t have lengthy sections on particular topics or stories. Every gig is just a barrage of brilliant jokes that take in a myriad of subjects, and it’s impressive how he remembers it all. So these are quite brief reviews, with a paragraph about the show and another about the extras in each case. I hope you enjoy!

Contents

• Tim Vine Live
• So I Said To This Bloke
• Punslinger
• Joke-Amotive
• Tim Timinee, Tim Timinee, Tim Tim To You
• Sunset Milk Idiot
• Breeeep!

Tim Vine Live

Apart from all his great jokes, this show includes songs about crayons, the deep ocean, family holidays and a box, some of which became audience favourites that he would end up performing on later tours. There are also a few running gags about sad paintings and tape recordings. And he’s even kept in the bits where his makeup lady comes on stage to dab the sweat off his face, and the occasions where he loses his place, as he still ad-libs jokes in those moments.

The main extra is a commentary where he talks about his jokes, props, songs and the audience’s reactions, and even shares a few additional jokes that didn’t make it into the show. There’s also an amusing 42-minute video diary of a month in his life, 5 minutes of home movie clips of performances from 1991-2004, a 2-minute music video for the ‘Deep’ song, and a 7-minute sketch about the end of a war in which there’s only one man left on each side.

So I Said To This Bloke

The longest sequence in this very funny show sees Tim trying to throw a pen so it gets caught behind his ear. He’s clearly missing on purpose for a while to drag it out, as it’s all geared towards the joke at the end of the routine, and another gag later in the show. But it gets funnier the longer it goes on, especially with the backing song as well, which gets stuck in your head, and it became another routine that audiences would ask him to do again over the years. He also does songs about his house, little things changing the world, allergies, rehearsing, his increasingly fast metronome, wrong foods and alarm bells. Plus he’s joined on stage by the Flag Hippo, and finishes with his take on the Footprints poem.

There are over 50 minutes of amusing extras as well, though some are very short. The longest are a 23-minute programme where Tim tries out different sports, and a conversation in a garden lasting 10 minutes on a variety of subjects. There’s also nearly 5 minutes from the encore of the show, where Tim’s dad Guy tells the first joke his son ever heard and the audience persuade Tim to do the Family Holidays song from his previous DVD. Beyond that, there’s an insightful video diary from Tim as he stars in the Cinderella panto in Wimbledon, a brief chat from a consultant psychologist about puns, a pop video about a juke box, a glimpse of Flag Hippo in love, and some scenes that have literally been deleted.

Punslinger

To go with the title, this show has a set decorated like a Wild West saloon, while Tim wears a cowboy outfit, and it starts with an opening animation followed by a little run of cowboy jokes. But the theme is irrelevant beyond that. The longest sequence is a mock ventriloquism act, where he controls an increasing number of puppets all at once, and in another part of the show he tells a joke that has 4 very different and equally funny punchlines for the same setup. Meanwhile some of his songs are about a missing hand, the cinema, squeaky shoes, changing TV channels, chasing butterflies and singing to the grass. Plus there’s some audience participation, including an inflatable ewe they have to throw around and a song that has them leaning in different directions, while in the encore they sing the Pen Behind The Ear theme, having persuaded him to do that trick again.

The extras include another insightful audio commentary, along with nearly 3 minutes of additional material from the encore, where he talks to the cameramen and plays with the cactuses on set. There’s also an interesting 15-minute look at how he puts a show together in the first place, with footage of him trying out material at the Outside The Box club. Beyond that, there’s also a 10-minute comedy film he made with friends in 1999 about a pair of incompetent crime fighters, and a very short extra of him proving that he can throw a score of 180 on his dartboard.

Joke-Amotive

Again the set and the first batch of jokes match the theme established by the show’s title, being train-related on this occasion. But after that it’s delightfully random as always. Musical numbers include nervous body parts, torches, an “easy” singalong, a laptop, waiting, a motorbike, a medley on the guitar, a piece of carpet, mobile phones, and a Bee Gees tribute, among other things. Then the finale involves Tim wearing a dartboard around his head while he tries to catch fake darts in his mouth.

Extras include another audio commentary, 4 minutes of additional scenes from the show with the return of the Box Song and Flag Hippo, a 26-minute video diary from the tour, 2 minutes of Tim performing as a blonde Elvis Presley, a 6-minute comedy film about a man inviting a reluctant country star to do a fundraising concert for him, and a 14-minute film about a man who jumps in fields who is hit by a UFO (with a cast that interestingly includes Nina Conti, best known for her brilliant ventriloquism).

Tim Timinee, Tim Timinee, Tim Tim To You

Fellow comedian James Acaster is credited with giving Tim the title for this show, based on the song from Mary Poppins, and so naturally it opens with a few chimney gags. Then, nestled in amongst all of his other great jokes, the musical numbers relate to things like having his own moves, good times, toys, a dancing pig, secret meanings, getting water in his ears, replacing a lock, and slow songs. Then towards the end there’s a baboon offering Maltesers and another outing for the Family Holidays song.

Beyond that, as well as another audio commentary, there are also a couple of 2-minute bonus clips from the show, one where he tries an alternative way of starting the gig, and another where he tells a longer story-based joke for a change, about being in an auction room. There’s 12 minutes of footage from a couple of other shows on the tour as well, as he re-enacts his first ever stage appearance in Croydon, and hosts a darts challenge on stage in Bournemouth. Finally there’s a 1½-minute pop video for an extended version of his Good Times song, and an 8-minute slideshow of photos from the tour with music from the show.

Sunset Milk Idiot

A backdrop of a field of cows, and a few jokes about ice cream, are the only vague references to the title at the start of this show. Granted, Tim always acts like an idiot as well (in a fun way), but that’s hardly unique to this performance! The longest section this time is all about vintage vinyl, with lots of music-related gags, and he even keeps in a mistake where he’d forgotten he’d asked the sound man not to play something, because it unintentionally makes the joke in question work better than he’d expected. As for other music, he performs songs about the special qualities of certain audience members, being like animals, an owl with a towel, pouring things down the drain, teddies on a hoop, Mr Future Man, his upbringing, sinking boats and a catchy singalong about cake and milk.

In terms of extras, there’s the traditional audio commentary, a couple of minutes of extra material from the encore including a song about catchy tunes, a slideshow of photos from the tour lasting nearly 9 minutes and soundtracked with instrumental music from the show, a collection of amusing adverts he filmed for different venues on the tour lasting almost 5 minutes, and a 30-second clip of him making a joke while performing one of his Plastic Elvis tribute shows. So aside from the commentary, which is always worth a listen, it’s probably the weakest set of extras on all of his DVDs up to this point, but the encore material and venue adverts are fun.

Breeeep!

Tim’s latest DVD is another rib-tickling collection of gags as usual, all of them brand new barring just a couple of favourites from previous shows. He also tells a couple of longer jokes, which is so unusual that he adds a bit of background music for them. He plays a couple of games with the audience as well, inviting them to identify out of focus pictures of garden items and people passing by a window, plus there are moments where he talks to the contents of his stomach and a sock puppet that shouts the names of sports. There are plenty of little songs too of course, including ones about animal noises, a safety announcement, a hollow leg, mottled marble, uplighters, being lucky, ice skating moles, being busy, playing songs on a gong, and a final singalong about some of his things. So he has a great variety of material to fill an hour with as always.

Once again there’s a great audio commentary to accompany the show, and it’s nice to have another tour video diary, this one lasting nearly 40 minutes, as on the previous couple of DVDs we only had photo galleries. There are photos included in this diary as well, but they’re used to break the feature into sections quite effectively, in addition to adding extra visual interest. There’s also a 1-minute extra where Tim explains how a bit of fluff came and went from his jumper during the show and a 4-minute compilation of footage he recorded using his iPad on the props table at a show in Torquay, which is rather pointless really as you only see his head and the ceiling, but it is interesting to see how messy his sheet of notes is at the end. Finally, there’s a 15-minute compilation of physical gags that Tim recorded way back in 1989, which are quite amusing. They’re presented a bit like a silent movie with a handwritten caption saying what each bit of acting represents before he does it, and present day Tim also interrupts from the editing room a few times to clarify certain things. So altogether it’s a good selection of bonus material.

Conclusion

And that’s it. I’ve enjoyed going through all of Tim’s DVDs again, and the fact that I’ve been able to do so in quick succession without getting bored of him is testament to his creativity and originality. It’s all completely silly nonsense, but clever nonetheless. When you think about the hundreds of jokes and songs he has to write and experiment with in the months leading up to each tour, and the large number of props he has to make, it’s quite incredible how much time and effort goes into the hour of absurdity he presents us with in each show. Hopefully I might get around to seeing him live one day, but in any case there’s always plenty to enjoy with these DVDs, and the other random things he does online. It’s always good escapism.