**
It’s a few years since I last saw Josh Howie and his latest show, AIDS: A Survivor’s Story, marks a change in tack for him. Not totally. Despite the doomy title he hasn’t suddenly gone all serious on us. But he is trying something stylistically different here. Taking an unlikely, absurdist position and sticking to it with absolute unsmiling conviction for an hour. It’s a truly audacious, utterly intriguing show. Shame it’s a bit rubbish.
As the title suggests, this is Howie’s story of living with AIDS. Now in his late thirties he grew up in the 1980s when AIDS was briefly seen as the biggest threat to modern civilisation. It was thought to be so highly infectious "don't die of ignorance" leaflets were put through everyone’s doors and John Hurt had to be brought in to do the voiceovers for the adverts. Fear backed by a Frankie Goes To Hollywood soundtrack stalked the land.
A caption on the screen behind him at the start says “None of the jokes are true, everything else happened". Howie tells the story of his life up to today, starting with how he “got AIDS” when he was 17. Having seen his previous shows I already know how neurotic Howie is. I knew a few people like that in the 1980s myself who were terrified of contracting the HIV virus through sharing beer glasses or cutlery, so his paranoid version of picking up the virus is actually quite credible.
What it isn’t is particularly funny. There are the occasional knowing lines and in-jokes, dubbing AIDS the “feminism of its day” and explaining that “I’m reluctant to be called the Bridget Christie of AIDS”, but whereas Howie used to have a neat line in self-deprecating Woody Allen-ish wit here everything here is delivered in a flat, deadpan monotone.
There are occasional flashes of something more accessible, such as when he riffs on an old 1980s fashion PR snap which features him and his sister and he makes himself the classic butt of the joke, but Howie is mostly determined to make things hard for himself by finding the humour in the dark side. There is a daring riff on anorexia that just about comes off and a nicely subversive line about Tom Hanks’ biggest AIDS movie being Forrest Gump.
If you get onto Howie’s wavelength this might work for you. But I thought I was on his wavelength and it didn’t work for me. But hey, even the greatest comedians had their wilderness years when they were developing their style. Look at Stewart Lee. In years to come when Howie is acclaimed as the masterful, meta-comedic clown he dreams of being maybe AIDS: A Survivor's Story will be seen as the place it all started. But it’s a tough hour to survive.
