In a certain light, John Tothill’s ‘Thank God This Lasts Forever’ is fairly mundane, insofar as it’s a collection of essentially plausible anecdotes from his life. If he didn’t teach at a primary school until recently, or have a teacher friend he used to get drunk with, or have a mouse infestation, or take part in a malaria trial… then these would be peculiar things to have made up about himself.
The reason you still might have some cause for doubt is that Tothill’s stage persona is like something beamed down from another planet (or at least a Rik Mayall episode of ‘Blackadder’). Louche and pretentious, he talks about teaching primary school kids as if he shared a calling with Lord Byron, at one point gleefully ragging on a secondary school teacher in the audience for having the less challenging job on grounds of the ‘polymath’ nature of primary teaching.
Flouncy of hair, shirt and trousers, it seems profoundly unlikely that Tothill could possibly be 100 percent ‘like this’ if you met him down the pub. I assume not everything he says is entirely true: he was still working as a teacher when he came to notice with last year’s surprise Fringe hit ‘The Last Living Libertine’; if he’s an ex-teacher now it’s presumably more likely to be down to his success as a comedian than his inference he got fired for poor timekeeping.
Whatever the case, his shtick of regaling us with stories from his life but with a Lord Rochester filter added is brilliantly entertaining. And from his teased out musings on ‘the rat that orgasmed to death’ to his account of almost dying on a clinical trial, it’s not simply that it’s funny that he has such an outlandishly other voice: there’s also the fact that his inner teacher clearly hasn’t gone away and has indeed mutated into a monster – he is forever lecturing us on what we should learn from eg a rat orgasming to death. Being told at length how to live our lives by an absurd dandy who can’t even hold down a job as primary school teacher is, simply, very very funny. If you were being mean I suppose you could on some level compare him to Russell Brand, but the differences are fundamental – Tothill does not get high on his own supply; the underlying punchline is how small time his character remains as a person: he doesn’t have any ambitions because he believes he’s living like one of the greats.
I didn’t see ‘The Last Living Libertine’ but it does sound like it was… the exact same idea, and perhaps Tothill will have to deepen his persona if he’s going to get a large number of future shows out of it. But it is still extremely early days – let him have fun! It’s possibly all he has.