An Evening With Kevin Smith

We don’t know what we expected. It wasn’t BO and a wedding ceremony initiated by Silent Bob himself, but that’s what we got.

An odd collection of people make it out on a Friday night for Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes’ Jersey Boys Tour. The amount of people dressed as Smith (hockey jerseys are rife) is disconcerting and leads to double takes and uncomfortable moments. There is the smell of desperate adoration in the air — which leads to gifts exchanged, self-aggrandising questions, and a sold out State Theatre holding onto every word as if it’s Gospel.

Smith opens with an anecdote about asking his wife for a pussy picture, before the Q&A begins: about one question seems to actually get asked, but maybe 100 unasked questions get answered as Smith goes off on tangents about Jay and Silent Bob walking dogs and the people who inspired him. He talks about changing your narrative, about following dreams, about what art is, and “pushing whimsy”, like a motivational speaker talking to a crowd of creative people who haven’t realised their potential yet.

Jay And Silent Bob Get Old opens with Smith responding to a request from Twitter to talk about Star Wars, so he does, rambling along at an appropriately fever pitch. Jason Mewes is on stage and their warped brand of storytelling/podcasting/middle-aged-men-talking-sex-is-this-subversive-I-don’t-know-anymore takes to the fore, and we hears about Mewes the helicopter parent, sections of the in-production Moose Jaws, Mewes’ intervention journal, and more, until it's close to midnight and Mewes is miming sex with the audience. Here, it’s Mewes’ and Smith’s rapport that keeps people engaged, as we watched a decades-long friendship and all its in-(and-out-)jokes (“I’ll recast you with Jason Lee”). We don’t hear or see anything new, but it’s earnest and fun, albeit dope-fueled, and self-referential, allowing the biggest fans to pull the most from it.