Chris Morris, the well-known British comic who hasn’t been active on the show circuit for a while, is mounting a comeback.
Morris hasn’t performed much since his 2001 Brass Eye special. He has been involved with several projects, such as co-writing the Channel 4 sitcom Nathan Barley, but these are not him as a comedy performer, writes Brian Logan of the Guardian.
But his appearance at Royal Festival Hall last weekend was a start. And he is slated to co-star in Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle BBC show.
Morris is going to take over the role of “hostile interrogator,” posing questions to Lee.
Logan says it’s high time for Morris to get out there again.
“How our comedy, and our culture, crave a satirist with that fire in his belly, that moral indignation, that fearlessness and insight,” he wrote. “It’s a commonplace nowadays to say of this contemporary phenomenon or that instance of collective delirium (the royal wedding, the Olympics, the death of Margaret Thatcher) that they’re crying out for the Brass Eye treatment. Which tells its own story about how toothless much mainstream ’satire' has become.”
Then again, Logan says that it could be the cameos on Stewart’s show “will allow just a glimpse of the great man, before he retreats back into the shadows.”
“Which is fair enough. He’s moved on from Brass Eye, his interests now lie elsewhere. Maybe we should be glad Morris isn’t hanging around, diluting the industrial strength of his burlesque, sullying the memories. But I won’t be able to look at that inscrutable-bordering-on-malevolent mug on the small screen without wishing Morris was back wreaking his devilment on Britain circa 2014, which needs his brand of tough love now more urgently than ever.”
