If, like many understimulated and over privileged people in the computer literate world, you have easy access to the internet and frequent various social networking, music streaming and video streaming sites, you can most probably comprehend the guilt and self-questioning emptiness that follows a two hour Facebook rampage culminating in shamefully flicking through the holiday pictures of your cousins’ ex-girlfriends’ nan frolicking against a grey sky on Skegness beach. Eyes as iced over as a Bakewell tart in a snowstorm, you lose all point of reference and drift weightlessly in cyberspace, sucked into a time vortex and destined to waste time consuming irrelevant gunk through your screen for eternity (or until the university students arrive back in your neighbourhood and hijack the bandwidth). Fear not, however, there is a man who will take your hand and wrench you from this lobotomised half-life, a messiah who has already read, watched and heard all that simultaneously torments and semi-interests you, a saviour reaching into this techno-encyclopaedic black hole and yanking out only that which is funny. His name is Adam Buxton, and the hairs of his beard have garnished a range of British comedy pies for a good few years now.
One of Buxton’s newest endeavours, BUG Playlist, masquerades as a study of the "evolution of music video" and has been running monthly as a successful live show at BFI Southbank, London for a few years, with the occasional tour of other privileged locations in the UK. Born from the ashes of Antenna, a long-running short film and music video showcase, Buxton screens and discusses some of his favourite music videos on stage, straight from his own desktop. Contrary to your initial judgement, as Buxton succinctly states this is "not as tedious and shit as that sounds". Falling somewhere between an extremely intimate stand-up comedy set, a showcase of staggering cinematic prowess set to music, and sitting on your mate's bed smoking a joint taking turns finding YouTube clips that make you laugh all the way to a hernia, it’s simultaneously avant-garde in its niche approach and snugly familiar. A sort of "internetc.".
Walking into the Hyde Park Picture House’s equally as cosy theatre, the audience for Buxton’s Leeds show are greeted to a looping clip montage of Buxton riding his bicycle, shot from a helmet-cam focused on his face. This serves as a slightly self-mocking reference to the music video that Buxton recorded for Radiohead’s ‘Jigsaw Falling Into Place’ and, with a countdown in place, builds the excitement for the start of the show. Beginning with some warm audience banter about Leeds, Buxton asks whether anyone dislikes inhabiting the city, in response to which one unfortunately brave girl raises her hand. Asking her to explain her ill-feeling, Buxton cuts her reasoning brutally short with a now infamous snippet from an enraged Pierce Brosnan; "then maybe you shouldn’t be living here!"
With this clip, it is obvious that the next 90 minutes will be full of self-reference and in-jokes, and just like Buxton’s BBC Radio 6 programme with Joe Cornish, increasingly more rewarding the more time you have already invested in the man. It’s not obvious whether Buxton’s computer desktop is personal or set up purely for BUG, or if the show is rehearsed in any way, as there are a lot of smiling fumbles, but even the names of folders and files have the audience whooping with delight at the prospect of what they might contain (‘Begging Letters from BBC3’, ‘New Lovemaking Ideas’ and ‘3D Pics of My Genitals’). Some material, like the primitively immature "rude names for days of the month" (my favourite being ‘Septmember’) or the badly made video for Gwen Stefani’s 'Shit (Bananas)' is original Buxton, other material is funny bumph he has found and his slant on it. "Tourette’s karaoke" is by no means politically correct, but has most people clawing at each other for the last nuggets of oxygen in the room, as does the participatory "count the Mobys", where pictures of Moby and other celebrity lookalikes (Bruce Willis, Michael Stipe, Heston Blumenthal) sail past, their names calmly spoken by Buxton who has miraculously memorised the order of this ludicrous procession of aging baldness.
Simultaneously the simplest and most hilarious feature is Buxton’s exposure of the levels of idiocy present in YouTube comments, narrated in his own special way. This tags on brilliantly to the end of screenings of especially entertaining, inventive or visually and technically stunning videos that our compére has chosen, such as the videos for Manchester Orchestra’s ‘Simple Math’, Is Tropical’s ‘The Greeks’, and a YouTube viral video ‘Complete History Of The Soviet Union, Arranged To The Melody Of Tetris’. For the last of these, Buxton follows the heated conversation between two YouTube subscribers, battling with limited brain cells apparently about the politics of Stalin’s purging of the Soviet population before the American involved admits "i’ll be honest...i was a little drunk when i read your comment, thought you were talking about vietnam. happy thanks giving :)". This lambasting of base-level fools hiding behind the internet wouldn’t be as funny in any other hands, but Buxton’s loving sarcasm brings the comments he has spent hours sifting through to life, creating brilliantly comical characters.
Finishing with a short edition of ‘Country Man’, Adam Buxton makes you want to go home, cuddle up to your computer and watch everything he has ever done. Including the home video of himself, Joe Cornish and Louis Theroux dancing to ‘Groove Is In The Heart’ in 1990. It exists. YouTube it.