Joanne McNally says her fans are ‘raccoons with balayage’ and I’d agree, but add to that: these dolled up, feral animals can’t stop cackling.
The racoons – me being one of them – tipped their heads back and exploded their lungs to the ceiling at the Eventim Apollo this week, when Joanne, 42, swayed onto stage with a wine glass the size of a football.
While this entrance rings true with Chat GPT’s summary of a Joanne McNally joke – ‘I drank a bottle of wine and pissed myself’ – she is so much more than crass boozing humour.Though these moments are also applauded and respected, of course.
Joanne is a cutting cultural critic as much as she is a stand-up comedian: covering Jeffrey Epstein – ‘You can’t be trafficking, lads,’ – Andrew Tate and Britney Spears, with blunt honesty that earns mega respect, stomping over sanctimonious online discourse as she goes.
In her shows, Joanne covers well-trudged comedy ground: the dreaded 20s, in which she admitted she couldn’t find her jaw due to its constant drug-induced swinging, and her 30s, in which all her friends ‘panic bought lads’ like it was a Black Friday sale. But while these decades for women are much-studied, Joanne does it with an unabashed, razor-sharp delivery only she can conjure.
While most stand up comedians might build up to a laugh through two minutes of appreciative chuckles until the big pay off, Joanne’s Pinotphile is a machine gun of rip-roaring gags.
Her turns of phrase are endlessly creative and immaculately astute: when men offer to take photos of women and somehow make them look like ‘splayed farm animals’ and getting men to wear a condom is like coaxing a dog through tunnels on crufts. That sort of thing…
Joanne observes the straight men in the audience like a twitcher might a rare invasive species. It’s not a man-hating hour though: more no holds barred, joyous p***taking. It’s well-deserved laughter therapy for any woman who has been personally victimised by a man.
Tongue firmly in cheek, Joanne implores her female fans to ‘ride the little ones’ – talking about short men – because they will really, really appreciate it.
But when Joanne’s jokes at the expense of men come like the clappers, she gives us a moment of self-awareness. (When a man cheats, he’s pathetic, scum of the earth. But when her mate Carol does it? She ‘needed it, it was for the best, Carol’.)
While Joanne parties alone on the dock of the bay, watching her mates hop onto a boat with whichever Joe, Dick and Harry they chose from the middle aisle at Aldi, she’s happy to see them returning slowly as she moves through her 40s.
But even if they don’t return, Joanne has the 3,400 women and gays who viewed her as their boldest, brightest, and funniest best pal during the dazzling hour that is Pinotphile. A few straight men dragged along by partners are likely also converted: she is impossible not to love.
I’m left feeling Joanne’s rise, which is exponential since I first met her two years ago, has somehow only just begun. One thing is certain: Joanne – single, childless, and an unmatched comedy rockstar – will never be alone.
Tickets to Joanne McNally’s Pinotphile, touring throughout the UK and Ireland until March, are available here.
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