Comedy album Tom Henry Kills lives up to its title

TOM HENRY KILLS by Tom Henry (independent). Available on iTunes. Rating: NNNN

I’ve been a fan of Tom Henry’s brand of deadpan humour for years, and he just keeps getting better. This album, while brief (like his jokes themselves), collects some of his funniest bits, which only improve on repeated listenings because you can savour how well they’re crafted.

Henry is a master of misdirection; he’ll bring up a subject, let it sit with you a while, and then, in his calm, casual way, take it somewhere else.

He’ll often deconstruct banal, everyday phrases – how so-and-so would never “hurt a fly,” for instance, or what it really means to be a “cradle robber.” Do you know some stupid factoid about how many Earths can fit into the sun? Henry has a withering comment to shut you up. Do you enjoy those maps in fantasy novels? After listening to one of the early album tracks, you won’t look at those squiggly little illustrations in the same way again.

While I was worried that Henry’s act would suffer without the great visual of his expressionless physical presence (captured in the excellent album cover illustration, a riff on police suspect drawings), it’s not an issue: his voice is intentionally uninflected, with just a hint of nasally sarcasm to emphasize his punchlines.

And while the jokes have a certain rhythmic sameness to them, they never get monotonous; a sequence of haiku poems, accompanied by a jazz percussionist, break things up. Besides, Henry’s observations are so fresh and off-kilter they create their own rhythms.