Review: Bennett Arron: I Regret This Already
Bennett Arron opens his new show I Regret This Already with one of those now obligatory content warnings.
“This is a show about death, dementia and depression — so if that’s not your thing, you’re free to leave.”
No one should. For one thing, as he briskly points out, you won’t get your money back. For another, you are unlikely to find a comedian more prepared to strip his life apart in front of a room full of strangers.
By the time it’s genuinely time to leave, you’ll know Bennett Arron better than most of your own relatives.You’ll know that his, was the only Jewish family in Port Talbot, which meant importing a mohel from Cardiff for his circumcision. The detail that the poor man couldn’t drive because of failing eyesight is pure Arron — absurd, affectionate, perilous – and you don’t have to be Jewish to get the joke.
Arron has long been known as “the UK’s first victim of identity theft” – a bureaucratic nightmare that left him financially stranded and even now, still unable to buy a house. On stage, he can now revisit that ordeal with disbelief rather than rage, but because he is so sweet ( don’t hate that Bennett ) the audience gets angry on his behalf. But Bennett just moves on, as he did with his family when he was homeless, but he is always a spit away from a joke to ease the ride.
Sometimes the show goes really deep – Man! – but resist the compulsion to throw him a blue blanket because he finds the humour in his father’s dementia and the death of both parents, but when he talks about depression, the room shifts so take a hankie or cry openly like me. He asked for a hands- up from fellow sufferers to test the temperature, but only two did. Incredible considering the state of the world beyond the walls of the Camden Comedy Club.
Fortunately when Bennett explained his own descent into black dog hell, there was an upside. His depression was triggered not by his own misery but by a prescribed prostate medication.Hurrah! It was a real phew moment and oddly generous to articulate all this, and if older guys in the audience fished for pen and paper it wasn’t obvious.
I think it was the late critic A.A. Gill who said that the problem with comedy isn’t that it’s not funny enough, but that it’s not sad enough. Arron understands as his show is full of melancholy, but never sinks into self-pity. Bennett is also an actor btw and has great delivery, which helps with a standup routine that is like an epic poem. Paradise Lost? Bennett would agree, as he also has an ongoing battle with antisemitism on the comedy circuit. This is crazy because his seemingly throwaway story about a former Jewish flatmate who dreamed of becoming a famous osteopath is so good when it is later resurrected, venues should be begging for Bennett.
I Regret This Already is truly life affirming, because if you can experience illness, bureaucracy, loss and depression and still stand on a stage making strangers laugh you’ve survived. Don’t regret not seeing him!
See him on 15th April – https://www.radlettcentre.co.uk/What-s-On/Comedy/Bennett-Arron
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