sun 31/08/2025

Comedy Reviews

Seann Walsh, Broadway, Letchworth Garden City review - Strictly's bad boy tells his story

Veronica Lee

Let's start with that kiss – the one that propelled Seann Walsh from “Who?” in last year's Strictly Come Dancing line-up to being the “bad boy” of the series after pictures of his drunken late-night clinch with Katya Jones, his married professional dance partner, appeared in the tabloids.

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Reginald D Hunter, Princes Hall Aldershot review - underpowered but the laughs come through

Veronica Lee

Reginald D Hunter drops the n-bomb near the top of the show. He means no offence, he tells the audience, but it's the vernacular where he comes from in Georgia.

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Krater Comedy Club, Brighton Komedia 25th Birthday review - a south coast institution celebrates

Thomas H Green

The Komedia is a Brighton Institution and celebrates its birthday tonight in a suitably raucous fashion. The Komedia began in 1994, founded by the directors of the Umbrella Theatre Company, and styled on the cabaret spaces they’d experienced touring Europe.

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Mark Thomas, BAC review - impassioned polemic about the NHS

Veronica Lee

Mark Thomas issues a health warning for Check-Up: Our NHS at 70  at Battersea Arts Centre  – “This show contains swearing, a video of an operation on a stomach and a description of being in A&E when a patient dies.” Indeed it does, but it also contains a heartfelt love letter to the health service Thomas was born in and, as a lifelong socialist, hopes to die in.

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Britney, Soho Theatre review - finding the funny in a brain tumour

Veronica Lee

A brain tumour isn't usually the subject of a comedy show but Britney, written and performed by comedy duo Charly Clive and Ellen Robertson, is just that. It's “the true story of what happens to two best friends when one of them [Clive] gets a brain tumour” – the size of a golf ball, her father helpfully pointed out.

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Tommy Tiernan, Shepherd's Bush Empire review - playful and poetic

Veronica Lee

Tommy Tiernan is something of an institution in his native Ireland, as a stand-up comic, newspaper columnist, sometime chat show host and full-time controversialist. Now his appearance as Da Gerry in Channel 4's Derry Girls has brought him to a wider audience – both geographically and generationally – and deservedly so.

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Angela Barnes, Blackheath Halls review - a pessimist turning the tables

Veronica Lee

Angela Barnes is one of life’s pessimists, she tells us at the top of the hour, but she’s trying not to be so world-weary, and to turn negatives into positives. And, while there’s so much awfulness going on around us, why not try to lighten the mood a little?

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Aziz Ansari, Eventim Apollo review - show follows his #MeToo moment

Veronica Lee

Most people in the UK know American actor and stand-up Aziz Ansari from Parks and Recreation, where he played the sarcastic and underachieving local government official Tom Haverford. Comedy fans will also know him as a successful club comic on both US coasts, and from his Netflix specials.

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Ed Gamble, The Stand review - amiable hour touching on personal issues

Veronica Lee

Ed Gamble starts the hour by telling us why his latest show is called Blizzard; he and a bunch of comic friends we stranded in New York by bad weather and it made the news - yet, strangely, the headline wasn’t a play on his name - a gift for hacks - but on the monicker of one of his mates. Cue faux outrage.

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Lou Sanders, Soho Theatre review - shame put under the spotlight

Veronica Lee

Have you ever felt the hot shame of saying or doing the wrong thing? Not just embarrassment – that's for amateurs, says Lou Sanders in her wonderfully honest and revealing show Shame Pig, in which she essays some of her life's red-faced moments.

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