“Why can’t I just be normal?” laments the comic and voice of Love Island, Iain Stirling. To which watching fans can only reply: “But you are. You’re as normal as can be.” Stirling’s show, Failing Upwards, recorded at Alexandra Palace and released on Amazon Prime Video, finds the Scotsman adopting the most normal of thirtysomething standup poses – that of the hapless manchild ill-fitted to adulthood, here redeemed by the love of a responsible and beautiful wife. Abnormal it is not, but the abjection and idiocy of Stirling’s self-portraits, energetically animated, often raise a smile.
Failing Upwards is strenuously of-its-moment in its depiction of feckless, emotionally underdeveloped men and competent, caring women, even if there’s a thread of humblebrag in Stirling’s repeated claim that, in his marriage to TV presenter Laura Whitmore, he’s “punching above his weight”. A sign of the times too, perhaps, is the extent of Stirling’s neurosis about his supposed chubbiness, which – after one more routine about his tubby belly eating the waistband of his boxer shorts – feels laid on a bit thick.
The show’s spine is a trip he takes to “hot yoga”, in a bid to impress his pregnant wife. Again, he overdoes the body-horror of this experience, as he is forced to use a second-hand yoga mat, all “piss fumes and pubic hair”. But there’s deftness in how the anecdote branches out into, and returns from, sub-sketches about women’s nights out, the impossibility of behaving naturally in front of a camera and – a standup standby, this one – airport security.
I can’t say I greeted all his comic observations with the laughter of recognition: some are hoary generalisations, others (“you can’t drink coffee in your thirties”) just overplayed. And the Scottish stereotypes are a bit tiresome. There’s nothing, finally, to justify Stirling’s normalcy anxiety – there are Greek priests less orthodox than this show. But there are enough flashes of wit and comic craft (the description of his posh yoga teacher; the punchline to his women-on-the-piss act-out) to ensure that, if it all feels a bit familiar, that’s no bar to being funny, too.
Iain Stirling: Failing Upwards is on Amazon Prime
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