‘Mo Gilligan: Momentum’ On Netflix Serves Up Nostalgia With A Beat

Imagine you’re a young British bloke, making up funny characters and releasing them in bits on social media, when all of a sudden Drake shouts you out.

That’s where Mo Gilligan found himself in the spring of 2017.

Since then, Gilligan has used that momentum to gain more than 544,000 followers on his Instagram, multiple appearances on the telly (including his own late-night show this summer on Channel 4), and now his own Netflix special, Mo Gilligan: Momentum. The 31-year-old keeps the show moving through his first hour, thanks in large measure to a backing band, which plays him onstage and supports several musical numbers and act-outs.

No longer constrained to the short, selfie routines of his Gram game, Gilligan prefers to keep the audience on his side by painting pictures of a scene involving group dynamics — your relatives at a wedding, bullies in a classroom, girls in group texts planning a birthday extravaganza — and then acting out the individual parts.

The band helps Gilligan demonstrate various wedding dances, or supplies the beat when he chooses to update nursery rhymes (Gilligan, born just as Andrew “Dice” Clay was becoming the biggest comedian in America, isn’t about making the rhymes unfriendly for families, tho), or even just provides instrumental scoring for his physicality as he bounds about onstage.

The hour’s chock full o’ nostalgic routines, as in do you remember when In The Night Garden was a children’s TV hit in the mid-oughts, or when you’d try to sneak back into the house whilst playing outside with your friends without alerting your mother, or when a group of young women heads out to the dance club.

A trip to America reminds Gilligan that he considers himself British first and foremost, and then black, and allows him to use his band once more for a closing number celebrating “old school gar-age music,” which starts as a tribute of sorts to Craig David, makes like he’s going to freestyle, and eventually winds up back where Drake discovered him, asking the audience to get him a couple of cans.

It’s where Gilligan chooses to go next with his career momentum that’ll be most telling.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.

Watch Mo Gilligan: Momentum on Netflix