Like Russell Brand, minus the wit or charisma …
… actually that’s a bit too fair, he’s nowhere near that good, though does have better hair.
Why go?
I have wanted to slate this show since Little Jordan got his Little Penis out to play the piano on C4 whilst screaming the immortal words “Imma better [woman] than you!” because he can do anal and squirt.
Originally I booked to see him at the Soho Theatre but the Little Scrote got covid and cancelled. He’s been touring with this show for two years now. It even made the London Palladium a week after the C4 appearance, a venue normally only reserved for comedians with established reputations, like Jimmy Carr. Jordan Gray, by comparison, only started on the circuit in 2018, having his first 15 minutes of fame as an entrant on the BBC talent show The Voice.
Jordan scored his first TV show a little bit later in 2020, a sitcom for Comedy Central, Transaction, and, according to IMDb, he also holds the sole writing credit, which I can believe.
Other reviews of Jordan Gray’s show Is It a Bird? have generously described it as ‘a gorgeous, accomplished and deeply funny hour […] with nuanced, creative standup’ (Guardian), ‘it can, and will, change opinions and lives’ (Independent), and ‘bold, provocative, and extraordinary’ (Chortle), are but a few raving reviews. Here’s mine: He’s like Russell Brand, minus the wit or charisma.
First act
Gray promised us the show was only an hour long, which sadly turned out not to be true. It was ninety minutes. Ninety long minutes of him doing his piss poor impersonation of Russell Brand, hair and all. Gray apes his obvious idol so much he should really advertise himself as Brand’s tribute act. The persona of man-out-of-control-but-still-cooly-ironic-about-own-narcissism is nauseating and a poor facsimile. And whereas Brand at the peak of his comedy career had hoards of fans, plus media interest to feed that narcissism, and a real reason to unpack it, Gray does not.
After informing us that his sister was in the audience, who he referred to as a ‘stupid little whore’, Gray burst into song. I’m assuming it was a humorous ditty but a contrived American drawl left the words barely audible. Very little response from the audience.
He picked out a couple he could bounce off for the rest of the show, the gag being each half of the couple would be interested in at least one half of his body. Audience participation box ticked. His breast implants and penis were constant themes – no surprises there.
Batman
Why do people, who have a problem with Gray using the women’s toilets, have absolutely no problem with Bruce Wayne self-identifying as a bat? I have to admit, I don’t have an intelligible response to that.
To keep things topical, Gray was keen to repeat the word ‘paraglide’ a lot in relation to Batman, who has never paraglided as far as I can remember, can you? Remember, paragliding involves suspension underneath a fabric wing, a bit like a parachutist, whereas Batman, when he flies (which he rarely does), glides with his cape. So, was Gray just being edgy for the sake of it? Or, was he trying to communicate something deeper to us about how he felt towards the Hamas terrorists who paraglided straight into a music festival to slaughter hundreds of Jews? I genuinely don’t know.
Being LGBTQ
Gray embraces his LGBTQ and Z-list celebrity status and it means, in turn, that he is embraced as a bona fide member of the community by Pride march organisers, having done personal appearances for the same up and down the country. Jokes about meeting up with pop stars ‘in various states of professional decline’ did make me laugh, so did pass the six-laugh test. Just.
I’m an excellent woman. A brilliant feminist. As far as I’m concerned I’m taking down the patriarchy ONE MAN AT A TIME!
Jordan Gray
Jesus Christ
Gray burst into song: Jesus may have died on the cross but did you know that Jesus was a zombie? No, scrap that. ‘Drink my blood and live forever,’ Jesus had promised, so really he was vampire, as why else did Judas ask for silver? Then another verse about Jesus being a werewolf. Then a joke about Jesus breaking the Virgin Mary’s hymen. ‘It’s a clever song, for clever people,’ sniggered Gray. ‘Christians are insane,’ was the closing refrain, which he invited the audience to join. He did very briefly acknowledge he wouldn’t do a similar song about muslims (who would?) but why tell such lazy jokes about Christians? It was already passé when Jerry Springer the Opera appeared in 2003 depicting an adult Jesus in a nappy. Perhaps Gray was trying to prove all beliefs are equal and equally stupid? Or perhaps he’s just an idiot?
The second half
After the intermission, Gray came back on stage to scream some more about ‘coming out’ and sang another song. This one was about being gluten-free. Gray appears to be unable to sing without adopting a transatlantic accent.
The next extended joke was about bigots loving their dogs way more than they like transgender people. Gray’s life would infinitely improve if he were a dog and not a transgender. And what about dogs with real human names?! Eh? Eh? Wot’s your name, son? Gray asked of an audience member. Andrew! Imagine a dog called Andrew. Well, says Gray, if you can call a dog a human name, you can fucking call me Misses, orwite! And if you can call your dog a baby, then you can think of me as a woman. You slags!
Do you know who else liked dogs?
Hitler. That’s right. Gray’s twist on the old tired joke about Hitler being an animal lover/vegetarian, was that Hitler probably loved his dog so much he bummed it. Labouring under the misapprehension that the joke was poor taste, Gray said that didn’t matter ‘cos what Hitler did was ‘very poor taste’ (imagine Brandesque screechy outrage and comedy walk). What’s wrong with joking about Hitler? he screeched again, more than 50 years after Mel Brooks’ The Producers was released. (For my own part, I couldn’t stop thinking of his earlier repeated jarring use of the word ‘paraglider’ and now here he was conjuring up the Holocaust.) Then Gray screeched that Hitler was ‘the bad guy, he’s like the worst guy’. He’s also 83 years dead and counting Jordan – do you really not have a more contemporary Aunt Sally to throw shit at? Fucking hell.
Jordan rips his jump suit around the crotch
While the interminable gags about dog fucking were still going on, Gray did the splits on the floor and ripped his jumpsuit, an event which was in no way predictable at all. Happily it provided another opportunity for him to remind us of his cock. Then he corpsed several times in a row at a joke, which could have been average, had he managed to tell it.
A song about clickbait
Another song. It started with the story of Mr Potato Head going gender neutral (I note Gray dropped the ‘Mr’ himself, thus complying with the brand decision and making his criticism that the article was a non-story utterly ludicrous). The need for ‘trans women’ to shit and piss where they wanted also popped up – ‘there’s no conspiracy to steal the toilets’ and would we prefer if he was in the men’s giving blowjobs to our boyfriends instead? Nobody is offended when someone asks for a black coffee and you don’t need to ask for consent when you ‘chestfeed’ your baby; these were just some of ‘myths’ that Gray claimed to be busting. People were laughing, not rolling round, but laughing nonetheless. I really have no clue why.
On transition
‘You can’t change your sex because your sex is genetic information,’ Gray told us pompously, as if no one in the audience knew. No, what Gray has changed is his gender. Gender is amorphous, nebulous and a social contract. Gray claims to take 8mg of oestrogen daily. Gray can’t have a baby though, nor does he want one when scientists find out how to impregnate men.
Babies with hard-ons
Which somehow segwayed into a joke about having to Google whether it was possible for baby boys to have an erectile response. Finally, the accomplished and nuanced note we were waiting for! One man quite rightly loudly gasped in uncontrollable disgust at this suggestion and it’s shocking really that it didn’t provoke more of this kind of response from the audience. Gray earnestly informed us that he had really looked it up on the internet, and that it was possible, and could even happen in utero. I’m not sure what he wanted us to do with this information.
Changing into his superhero costume in a telephone box
Of course, Gray emerged from the box stark bollock naked and remained so for the last 15 minutes of the performance. He certainly doesn’t look like he’s been taking 8mg of daily oestrogen, is all I can say.
Whilst his cock bounced about with gay abandon, Gray began whinging about those people fighting for sex-based rights, labelling them ‘Nazis’. Why, when he had gone to Melbourne recently there had been a demonstration where people held horrid signs. Also, Hitler only had one ball and he has two (joke dates from 1939). Gray then pointed out the obvious, he isn’t circumcised. Serenading the couple he had picked out at the beginning, he sang the ‘transgender alphabet’ … ‘A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J. K. Rowling is a cunt’. I did wonder when he was going to mention her. Then he did the song he did on C4 Friday Night Live and it was all over. Thank God!
It was all a bit off
Post performance I wondered what websites Jordan Gray might have consulted which told him that infant boys were capable of sexual response and whether the information he had consulted, via Google, arose from the data Alfred Kinsey had collected from a prolific child sex abuser*. The abuser, known only as Mr. X, claimed to have raped hundreds of children, and adults, of both sexes, also purporting to have cataloged every single sexual encounter he had ever had, both consensual and forced, including recording data on the masturbation of two month old babies. Mr. X also claimed to have a bestiality problem and was keen on incest, claiming to have had full sexual relations with several close relatives. Kinsey, thirsty to prove his own theories about sexuality, persuaded Mr. X to submit his records to his sexology Institute, with Mr. X’s records eventually published as neutral fact. Kinsey did not report the perp to the authorities and saw no problem with presenting information about the alleged rapes of infants as if the responses were consensual.
Anyway, this is a bit of aside really, as I highly doubt Gray knows anything of the controversies surrounding Kinsey’s research, but rather just a jabbering fool, regurgitating what the culture has fed into him.
* As detailed in the biography of Kinsey by James H. Jones – Chapter 21 “A Report on What People Do”, though you can read a bit about it here in an online article. It is also worth pointing out that Kinsey felt Mr. X met the definition of ‘pansexual’, a word that now means something quite different.
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