Tim Minchin: Back Review
An overlong and tired performance that delivers very little in the way of laughs.
Tim Minchin is back in Tim Minchin: Back, a comedy special that touches on not just his day to day life, but his history with comedy in general.
Minchin is a talented and gifted musician, and for a while in the early to mid-2000s he was a tour de force in the comedy scene. His manic piano playing, on stage antics, and ability to string together a joke amidst a musical assembly of notes was fresh and new, and felt like something we’d never seen before. He also was willing to tackle topics that until then had seemed relatively untouchable in the public domain - in particular, his willingness to discuss his atheism in broadly national and international spheres, and take aim at those of faith.
Today, however, we live in a new time. No longer is an atheist railing against religious structures unique, as Ricky Gervais - whose schtick on that matter continues to get more and more tired - can certainly attest. The social media age has laid waste to the previous sanctimony around those things, and nowadays it's almost a more edgy take to take up a faith than to decry it.
Minchin, whose self awareness is admirable, recognises this and indeed calls it out. He has been a little pigeonholed in that respect, particularly in the comedy sphere. Here, he calls it out, and while he touches ever so slightly on that aspect, for the most part the jokes he’s angling for are more relevant than other comedians whose star rose with that era, and who have failed to let that go.
The issue with Tim Minchin: Back is that while Minchin may be willing to update the content of his jokes, the format of his show and his approach to comedy hasn’t change. This fundamentally structural issue is absolutely pervasive in this stand-up special, which consistently reminds you of better, funnier comedians who - admittedly potentially having drawn off Minchin’s own work back in the day - now have perfect his art to a higher degree.
Back suffers from comparison to works like Bo Burnham’s Inside, which musically felt tighter, smarter, and more biting than anything here. Similarly, his self-deprecating crowd work, seeming to divert into tangential asides and mutter brain farts that occur to him, are done now by many comedians better. Perhaps that points to the streaming age we live in, and the ability for the public to have access to this sort of comedy more frequently than when Minchin last released a major special; we’re too familiar with too many good comedians to let the visible support on Minchin’s structure slide. It all feels too composed, yet falsely improvised at the same time. The smashing of a shot glass on stage in particular is the icing on the cake; a moment feigned as spontaneous, but all too scripted for a now informed viewership.
Minchin is a talented musician, there’s no doubt about that. His work in the theatrical space can attest to that. Similarly, he is a very smart writer, and his work in TV stands as testament there. But comedically, Tim Minchin: Back makes you wonder if he really is back, or if he is simply resurrected from a time we’ve all moved past. His songs work, but aren’t catchy or likely to be hits. You aren’t going to have a Minchin song from this special top a Spotify chart, unless it's the Spotify Presents: Vaguely Disappointing Musical Comedy 2022 chart.
As much as he wants it to be a fresh and new Tim Minchin on display in Back, the man can’t shake the old Minchin. Despite having new jokes, the structure, format and delivery all feels stale in this modern world of comedy, and the structure shows too much for the savvy audiences of today.
Tim Minchin: Back is certainly a throwback, but it's also a dinosaur that has no place in the modern comedy landscape.
TIM MINCHIN: BACK will be available to own or rent on all major digital platforms December 12