He’s back hosting the Brit Awards – and no doubt will be recycling the same tired jokes
As any oarless boat out at sea could tell you, it’s easy to drift. One might argue that this is what Jack Whitehall has been doing for, oh, the past decade now – drifting along, hoping his natural charm might just suffice for ever. Is there any other comedian in the country who has done quite as well as he, while exerting such seemingly scant effort? As Whitehall steps up once more to host the music industry’s annual Brit Awards, the very idea he might have to toil for his fee will surely come as a novelty.
Fifteen years ago, Whitehall appeared full of potential. He was, in many ways, anathema on the comedy circuit: too posh, too pretty, a bit twee. But he was terrific in the Channel 4 comedy Fresh Meat – written by Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, the duo behind Peep Show – and proved a highly effective panellist on the comedy sports TV quiz A League of Their Own, where he was surely the hero for every non-sporty and weedy watcher, chiefly because he always managed to have the last laugh.
When Hollywood came calling, Whitehall didn’t have to be asked twice. But here he’d appear in a series of ultimately unremarkable films that hardly stretched him, including Jungle Cruise and Clifford the Big Red Dog. He soon cashed in his return ticket home – back to the comforts of familiarity, to recycle his same old jokes the way the rest of us do cardboard.
In recent years, Whitehall, now 36, has simply repeated that initial winning formula of his ad infinitum: cocky young man with an air of entitlement, laughing at himself. In his stand-up shows, he continues to talk about having a posh father (which left him with “daddy issues, but fluent in Latin”), and how he remains woefully unprepared for maturity in the face of having a father (yes, him again) whose own jarring – if faux – Victorian values have rendered Whitehall a perpetual, larky adolescent.
On television, he returns relentlessly to (what else?) his father-and-son travel shows, which may have been deadpan and wry the first time around but, by series five, are merely dead and dry. The most recent instalment was so thin in direction and intent, you couldn’t quite believe Netflix had agreed to screen it.
Still, the “daddy” stories keep coming, as well as several “mummy” ones, and how both “Daddy” and “Mummy” impacted him on becoming a father himself. His last tour played to a raft of middling reviews, the general gist being: “Must try harder.” Does he not want to impress his audience? Can he really not be bothered?
Bad reviews are never nice to read – and never as much fun to write as you might think – but sometimes they can be the sharp stick that’s required. Whitehall didn’t get here simply because he is well-connected. He did so because he was funny – at least when delivering lines other people had written for him – and because he had charisma.
But consistently good comedy requires hard work; just ask the country’s leading meta-comic Stewart Lee, who wears the effort of his wilfully subversive humour all too visibly. (At Lee’s last stand-up tour, he greeted each audience nightly by saying: “I know what you’re thinking: Christ, Stewart Lee’s let himself go.”)
By comparison, Whitehall looks like he lives on a diet of fatted calf and his father’s wine collection. And if his last Netflix special was anything to go by (Fatherhood with My Father), his wife raises their daughter ostensibly by herself, albeit with a nice pram.
Ironically, he will probably be good value on the Brits, because when he hosted them between 2018 and 2021, he was terribly awkward – and awkward, in a live setting, is a blood sport. If, during a comedy “bit”, he fails to fully connect with, say, Central Cee quite as easily as he might an erstwhile Girl Aloud, then his embarrassment can only improve the viewing experience. Come for the show-off, stay for the toe-curling.
Nevertheless, the hope that, at some point soon, Jack Whitehall will actually pull his finger out and make an effort again is a fervent one. Come on Jack, work for a living, why don’t you? The rest of us do.
