Calculated comedy: comedian Ollie Horn (right) homed in on Inside Croydon’s reviewer and his two-slices-a-day habit
THEATRE FESTIVAL: As this year’s Croydonites Festival enters its final few days, KEN TOWL returns to The Front Room for one of its highlight shows
It’s not about toast. It was never about toast, though comic Ollie Horn would tell you otherwise.
The Front Room was packed out last night by what turned out to be an international crowd ready to ‘fess up to their toasted bread habits as a vehicle for Horn to show off his comedy chops.
The blurb in the Croydonites programme describes The Most Toast as the “multi-sell out Edinburgh Fringe cult hit”. A no-doubt international crowd at the greatest arts fringe festival in the world couldn’t be wrong, could they?
As the audience was ushered in, everyone was given a name tag on which they were instructed write their “full names as they appear on your passport”, and informed that they were under exam conditions. Those who continued to chat were shushed and reprimanded.
Horn was able to use the name tags to set himself up as – as an audience member quipped – the toast master. “Amanda! No talking!” were the first words that he said. And then, in something that Time Out likes to call a “tonal shift”, this stern school-teacher-like approach dissolved into a more playful back-and-forth.
Horn set out the premise of the show: in every given room somebody has had the most toast. Horn’s mission was to find out who this was.
His white-coated assistant stood across the stage from him, looking even sterner than he did. Her job was to write out calculations on a flip chart. The comedy came from the awkwardness, the silences when audience members were unable to calculate their own consumption, the personal truths they blurted out when under pressure from Horn, that he was able to amplify or wilfully misinterpret. This was the comedy of cringe.
This is a comedic trope up at Edinburgh: a show that purports to be about one thing as a vehicle for comedians to practise their wits.
Here in Croydon, it wasn’t really about the toast, which was a relief. I felt that, at 66 years old with a pretty regular consumption of two slices for breakfast since about the age of 16 (up to when I had been more of a consumer of Kelloggs’ products), I was in danger of winning. I decided to keep my head down. I was here to observe, not to take part.
In front of me, 74-year-old Ted was providing Horn with comedy gold as he rambled through a surreal and highly unfocused explanation of his transition from bread and butter as a preferred breakfast constituent since he had met his wife and, tangentially, how inadvisable it was to “put a piece of toast into a freshly warmed soup”.
Horn asked if his wife liked toast and Ted said she liked it a lot, and that is why he had transitioned, and she had it three times a week. “I hope that’s not a euphemism,” said Horn. “This show is about toast.”
Unfortunately, at this point, Horn noticed that I was scribbling down notes behind Ted. When he asked me if I was calculating my toast consumption, I said I was. I didn’t think there was much comedy value in saying, “No, I’m making some notes for a piece for Inside Croydon.” So, I quickly calculated that two slices a day for 50 years was around 700 a year and that 50 times that was half of 70,000, so 35,000.
I was hoping that, with the calculation done, the number could be noted on the flip chart and Horn could move on to someone else. But it was never about the toast.
View from the cheap seats: the show really did include some toast and toast-making
The comedy was in questioning my calculations and then, when I admitted that maybe I had over-simplified and there was a period of some years when I had mostly consumed just one slice, he questioned my integrity, and asked my guest, a friend who knows me well, to give an example of a time I had told the truth.
Put on the spot like that, she was incapable of doing so.
I had been well and truly impaled on Horn’s comic device.
He also savaged a particularly assertive Swede who claimed that British bread was of poor quality and that only square bread could be toast, and, when it became apparent that there were a few South Africans in the audience, made a joke about how, presumably, they only made toast out of white bread.
It was a South African, Brett, who came to my rescue.
Despite having eaten toast for a decade less than me, he had gone through a period in which he regularly consumed eight slices throughout the day – and added eggs to the mix. The flip chart calculations put him around the 50,000 mark, a figure that turned out to be unbeatable, even by the woman who had been to a lot of festivals in her 20s and virtually lived off toast.
To the strains of Land of Hope and Glory, Brett was invited on to the stage to stand behind a table bedecked with a range of breads and toppings and a toaster. Horn left the stage and Brett stood alone behind the table as the music played. Eventually, mercifully, Horn called out, “Make some toast!”
After Brett had toasted two slices and spread one with Marmite and the other with Biscoff, Horn called out, “Eat the toast!”
As the plucky runner-up, I was encouraged to run up to Brett and shake his hand, but Brett’s hands were dripping with oil-based spread and crumbs, so we made do with bumping elbows, as if we were back in the days of covid.
It was not about the toast (though Brett might disagree, and Horn definitely would), it was about fun and wit, and Horn supplied plenty of both. At one point during the show a member of the audience had challenged him and then modified this with, “But I am enjoying the show!”
Horn noted that, “This format is paper thin at the best of times.” It was, but Horn carried it off.
Three cheers for Horn. He deserves a toast.
More Croydonites reviews:
- ‘If a bear attacked me, no one would ask me what I was wearing’
- In a world of Russian bots and algorithms, Maxwell spied hope
PAID ADS: To advertise your services or products to our 10,000 weekday visitors to the site, as featured on Google News Showcase, email us inside.croydon@btinternet.com for our unbeatable ad rates
- If you have a news story about life in or around Croydon, or want to publicise your residents’ association or business, or if you have a local event to promote, please email us with full details at inside.croydon@btinternet.com
As featured on Google News Showcase
- Our comments section on every report provides all readers with an immediate “right of reply” on all our content. Our comments policy can be read by clicking here
Inside Croydon is a member of the Independent Community News Network
As Baron Pierre de Coubertin would have it, Ken, it’s not about the winning, it’s about the taking part.