DAILY MIRROR, 21st August 2009:
If you're tired of hearing polite, nice, middle-class comedians trying to mine their own, largely fluffy lives in search of something funny, Janey Godley will be both a blast of fresh air and a blessed relief.
A clever, passionate and lyrical comedian, her show, currently running at the Pleasance Queen Dome, is magnificent. The only comedian I've ever known to personally welcome you to the gig as a long lost family member, it was a great way to get us all on her side and wavelength before the show had even started; artful and yet naturally warm.
Her show is built around her globe-trotting adventures this year from L.A to Auckland and back - and hilarious adventures they are too. The L.A. bus story is a classic - and one I could relate to having travelled on buses all around L.A - they really are full of the most nutty, whack jobs you will ever see and better still, the loonies on the bus think you're also a loony, so you can behave pretty much any way you want to behave and it will be excused as standard bus-based madness. Janey is Queen Of The Bus.
Throughout the show, her rich Shettleston accent embroiders and enhances every phrase, becoming inextricable from the humour itself. However, none of her tales of ordinary madness would be as funny as they are without her fine eye for the details of life.
Her dissection of Christian's trying to recruit her to pray for sick kids in Nottingham was deliciously vitriolic.
Indeed, the whole show is infected with a fierce passion and is fearlessly confrontational when it needs to be, but never surrenders the vulnerability that we all have as humans. That's what makes her show so warm and is why the audience loved her.
Janey Godley deserves to play to packed houses every night. She is a very rare talent indeed; a beacon of truth, guts and soul that burns bright in the often dark, overcast skies of nasty, cynical, self-indulgent 21st century comedy.
