Reviewer Tim Harding gives a rundown of the comedy he's been watching in the last two weeks.

Sequentiality is an underused trope in stand-up. Most other artforms made the realisation long ago that audiences respond to serialised narratives. Movies, comic books, TV shows – in the early days of each form, their stories were self-contained: the setting refreshed and a new story starting with each instalment. Serialisation was an evolution that allowed for the possibility – or the illusion – of deeper relationships with characters and premises that could change over time, as well as providing an impetus for viewers to come back to the same series over and over again. Creators no longer had to win them over anew each week, it was assumed they would tune in to see what happened next.

There are a few good reasons why sequential storytelling doesn’t happen in the same way in live comedy. Firstly, if you have to take your product from town to town at yearly intervals, at irregular times and in irregular places, it’s very hard to guarantee that your audience will be up-to-date on previous instalments, and even if they did see the last one, they may well have forgotten the plot beats. Also, if you’re cannibalising your own experiences for material on a rolling basis, what happens if the arc of your life doesn’t fit into a satisfying narrative? Or worse, what if simply nothing much happens to you one year?

But serialisation still happens accidentally. Go to see the same comic year after year and you’ll notice the same background characters popping up in their stories. Boyfriends become husbands become exes, parents pass away. The comic themself changes, maybe becomes wiser. Marking these changes and the way they mirror changes in your own life is one of the most satisfying aspects of the audience/performer relationship.

Until recently, not many comics have attempted to codify this element, but earlier this year, American stand-up Ali Siddiq released the fourth part of Domino Effect, a monumental autobiographical stand-up show that runs to well over six hours and builds a narrative that takes him from early childhood through his five-year incarceration for drug trafficking and up to the point he decided to become a stand-up.

Many stand-ups end up composing similar documents about their own stories by accident, but Siddiq’s choice to be intentional about it and present the shows as one massive work broken into chapters is an interesting one, and contributes to a sense that Domino Effect Part 4: Pins & Needles is not just the latest update from a funny guy, but the deliberate narrative and thematic culmination of a modern American saga. This is the kind of thing that gets the Pulitzer panel interested.

It helps that Siddiq’s life is more eventful than most. His story has love, crime, violence, religion and political upheaval, and offers an insider’s view on a world – maximum security prisons and gang culture in Part 4 – that remains largely unexplored in stand-up. 

He filmed and conceived Domino Effect as four linked specials and released them at intervals on YouTube over a two year period, gradually building momentum to the point where it’s impossible to ignore his achievement. In making all the chapters available online, he’s successfully intuited where his audience want to find him, and allowed them to follow along while he built a story at a scale that wouldn’t be possible if confined to the live circuit.

With more and more UK comedians uploading their specials to YouTube, this seems like an area that’s ripe for exploration and an interesting way to create an audience that keeps coming back for more.

The special itself? Pretty good. He has the storytelling chops of Dave Chappelle before he went mad and fell off, and if his outlook retains a brutality that’s uncomfortable to fully sympathise with, it feels earned. The man’s lived a very real life, and he recounts it very funnily and with great skill, but it’ll be the sense of witnessing an American epic that sticks with you.

Now if we’re talking about UK comedians who might benefit from this approach, John Tothill springs to mind, and not just because I saw his finished show Thank God This Lasts Forever at the Soho Theatre last week. 

Since his debut, Tothill has almost died twice, from malaria and a burst appendix respectively, and suffered infestations of mice and scabies. His new show touches on some of those Biblical afflictions, but also dwells on innate mammalian hedonism, frequently returning to the propensity of rats (and humans) to ‘orgasm to death’ – seeking pleasure at any price. 

I have to say, Tothill is so absolutely on fire right now, orgasming to death seems apropos. His warmth, vivacity and brilliant writing make for an overdose of pleasure. Buy a ticket to enter into a Faustian bargain: he’ll run 15 minutes over and in return you’ll get one of the best shows of the year.

Also at Soho Theatre, also brilliant, Ania Magliano’s new show Forgive Me Father establishes her as an everywoman for our times; breezier, more confident and more effortlessly magnetic than ever before. As in her previous show, she unpacks an inspirational quote and then begins to plait a number of strands – her parents’ divorce, the commitment issues she feels around moving in with her boyfriend, her relationship with her hormonal coil among others. But where I felt her last show jumped around a little disjointedly, the experience here is smooth as silk and full of clever lines. 

I had a sense that, despite this story being well- told and beautifully constructed, Magliano is taking her place in the pantheon of natural comics who no longer need a specific story to tell – an hour spent in their company is reason enough to leave the house.

• Both Ania Magliano and John Tothill have tour dates next year. See our Comedians On Tour page for details.