There really is nobody like Paul Foot. For close to a couple of decades now, the gesticulating, mulletted mathematician has ploughed his own furrow with the demeanour of a lightly sedated Rik Mayall and a love for niche statistics.
There are shades of his best and most famous niche statistics routine (2013’s ‘shire horses’ bit that we in the office are still quoting to this day) as he once again turns to numbers to prove that we could be in far better socio-economic straits right now, were it not for our commitment to being horrible to each other.
“The world’s got dark hasn’t it?” he says at the top of the show, and initially his targets risk feeling a little antiquated. While it wasn’t all that long ago that Liz Truss, Suella Braverman and Covid were sending the country spiralling, such is the speed of British politics – not to mention the rolling current of global horrors – that evoking them almost feels quaint. However, by the time Foot opens up the emotional heart of the show – a suitcase that belonged to his grandmother, who escaped Nazi Germany as a young Jewish woman – it’s clear that he has been thinking a lot about our cultural moment of dehumanisation, and what his role, as someone with a platform, is within it.
It’s a surprisingly political show which targets genocide, bigotry and their purveyors – Silicon Valley moguls, corrupt figureheads – head on, while still balancing it out with trademark absurdist frivolity.
Paul Foot: The Future, Underbelly Cowgate, until 30 Aug (not 19), 7.20pm