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If you’re not sure who Michael McIntyre is or what he does then you’re either abroad or refusing to switch on your TV.

He is a 33-year-old stand-up comedian who has experienced a meteoric rise to fame over the last couple of years. He’s come from literally nowhere, largely because of the decision by Prince Charles to put him into his own 60th birthday celebrations as well as a Royal Variety Performance in 2006.

Fastest selling

McIntyre is currently coming to the end of a UK tour that has filled huge arenas and concert venues several times over. He is playing to audiences that Bon Jovi and U2 would be proud of. His 2008 DVD Live and Laughing was the fastest selling debut ever, at an estimated total of 750,000 copies, and his recently released Hello Wembley has shot to the top five in the DVD charts in this lucrative pre-Christmas season. He has been nominated for three British comedy awards and could easily steal the show.

McIntyre has very quickly become a celebrity despite the fact that he is so unlikely as a comedian. He is not particularly attractive or cool. He is a chubby ex-public schoolboy with a floppy fringe who talks posh. He is quite camp but totally married with a wife and two small children (also with posh names) who he clearly adores. His trademarks include a rather daft pink shirt and skipping across the stage. He is liked because he does the job that he sets out to do — making us laugh — and he does it really well. Like Susan Boyle on Britain’s Got Talent or Stacey Sullivan on the X Factor, he has gained fame and recognition for being great at what he does without the pretension or glamour-gloss of professional celebrities. He is genuinely funny. Even thinking about his jokes or reading about them makes people want to laugh out loud.

Observations on life

His jokes are mainly observations about ordinary life and they stick in the psyche because of his use of wordplay and the amusing observations that he makes about everyday life. Many will recognise his ‘man-drawer’ routine. A place in every home where the batteries, old mobile phones, foreign currency and appliance instructions are kept. The routine involves him being summoned on an unlikely mission that asked him to make use of strange items which, conveniently, could be found in the man-drawer.

The concepts are simple but the delivery makes his fans cry with laughter. Yet his jokes do not make use of swearing (although it is not totally absent), don’t delve into political or sexual details and he is on the whole very nice about his wife.

Laughing at ourselves

It’s not a particularly calculated decision on his part to present himself as ‘safe’; ‘I don’t go out of my way not to offend people’, he says, but most people list his inoffensive routines among their reasons for liking him. He causes us to laugh at ourselves, rather than at other people. He doesn’t attempt to be clever, just entertaining. His spot-on Top Gear spot earlier this year had the cynical Jeremy Clarkson spilling his cup of water in his hysterics with his ‘Triumph overtakes Porsche’ story. ‘I just do what anybody else would do at dinner parties’, he says. ‘I just take a story that really happened and elaborate on it a bit. The difference to being at a dinner party is that you haven’t got your wife there saying, “No that’s not what happened!”’

He is not without his critics, who are found mostly among other comedians such as veterans Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer. They think he is too boring and bland. Michael McIntyre concedes that if everyone was the same as him then comedy today would, indeed, be boring. ‘You’ve got to have a variety’, he says. The fact is that he talks about what he knows and what makes him laugh. ‘If I’d had a more troubled upbringing, maybe I’d do more edgy material, but all that happened was some people came round for pasta, so I talk about pasta. Lots of people have that life. You can’t criticise people for that.’

Pointing out our pretensions

Inevitably he is popular among Christians because of his refreshingly na•ve approach to life. That does not mean we should switch off our critical faculties or laugh along in agreement with all aspects of his worldview which will not totally tally with our own. There are definitely still moments in his routines which not all Christians would feel happy about watching. Yet McIntyre has a way of disarmingly pointing out our pretensions and areas of pride — never a waste of time.

Joking aside

Fastest selling

Observations on life

Laughing at ourselves

Pointing out our pretensions

Eleanor Margesson

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