Opening, like all good comedians, by goading the audience, Christie begins Jacket Potato Pizza by berating us for not being at home with our families this Easter Sunday evening (“so what, you just eat their lunch, grab your chocolate egg and fuck off?”).
In fact, it’s quite fitting to be here at Easter - a festival, after all, said to be named after the female reproductive hormone oestrogen - as oestrogen (and, more precisely, the performer’s sudden lack of it) turns out to be one of the key themes of the night.
It is oestrogen, Christie notes, that gives women the urge to nurture and please both their children and their menfolk, stopping them from running a mile from the latter and dashing the brains out of the former at the first opportunity. But at 54, Christie’s supply of the stuff is now at a critically low level - along with her tolerance for the kinds of behaviours that she once used to forgive.
Along the way we are treated to a by-the-by critique of Trump’s violence and misogyny, through the device of an imagined phone call between Melania Trump by one of her girlfriends: “oh no, what’s he done now? Was it the courts finding him responsible for the sexual assault of Jean Carol? No, you’re right, that was perfectly understandable for the times, wasn’t it? Was it his comment on Howard Stern’s show that his daughter Ivanka was a piece of ass with a great body who he would date himself were she not his daughter? No, true, that was just laddish banter, wasn’t it? Was it his illegal and unprovoked war against Iran? Oh yeah, I suppose that is good for business, isn’t it… Wait, what?? He put a red sock in the white wash? Bastard, leave him immediately!” Perhaps Trump himself is on the menopause, she speculates, referencing the similarities between its symptoms and those of dementia.
Also tackled are the travails of living with a teenage daughter. Instead of recruiting foreign nationals to fight his war, President Zelensky would be better off sending all the 15 year old Ukrainian girls to the frontlines. Shooting their withering looks of utter disgust, the Russian soldiers’ spirits would be completely crushed within half an hour, sending them running back to Russia where even getting shot by Putin would be a preferable experience.
One of the benefits of getting older Christie extols is gaining confidence, and giving less of a shit about what people think. Things that once would have set off a spiral of mortifying embarrassment and shame are now simply shrugged off, she explains, giving the example of being spotted eating cake out of her bin by a nearby gardener. Where once she would have immediately attempted an elaborate mime pretending to be searching for something buried deep in its recesses, she instead just offered him a piece out of her mouth.
Cleverly entwined in all this is the critique of an enduring sexism, reflected in a culture industry which can transform even the most important contemporary analyses of misogyny into entirely male-centric TV shows. In a breathless satirical commentary on Adolescence - and the awards ceremonies that followed - all of this is laid bare in the most hysterical way.
It takes a supremely talented comedian to pack the biggest theatres in the land for months with what is effectively a feature-length monologue on the menopause - but that is precisely what Christie has achieved. Like all the more interesting stand-ups, she uses comedy as a vehicle to deliver some quite uncomfortable truths about the society from which her audience is drawn; but don’t worry - like the best of them, she is consistently hilarious when doing so.