Tim Harding's comedy diary

In this new fortnightly column, reviewer Tim Harding gives a rundown of the best comedy he's been watching in London... 

It’s a pseudy adage that comedy = surprise + satisfaction, but if you see a lot of comedy it’s easy to build up a resistance to being surprised. 

That’s why I’m pleased to report that my fortnight in comedy started with something I’d never seen before: Natalie Palamides projectile vomiting straight on to the stage of the Soho Theatre for about 30 seconds. At the time, she was around ten minutes into her performance of Bill O’Neill’s best newcomer-nominated show The Amazing Banana Brothers and had catastrophically underestimated the amount of cardio it requires to slip on 1,000 banana peels in an hour. A couple of punters fled the scene immediately but those with stronger stomachs enjoyed the rest of the show.

Palamides has been part of this kind of switch-up before, when Doctor Brown, her director on Nate, took over her role for a special one-off performance that provided a further fascinating complication to that show’s explorations of consent by having a man playing a woman playing a man. 

There was a bit of that too in Palamides’ Banana Brothers performance, especially when asking an older audience member to kiss her nipples better – but otherwise her presence just made a deceptively tight show a little more ramshackle. I’ll remember the puking incident as the cherry on top.

The following evening brought more Palamides, again at the Soho Theatre. She’s working up a new show called WEER, which, like Nate, plays with gender, this time by having her in a costume split down the middle, so she can be a man with her right side and a woman with her left side. 

She’s using this conceit for a rather complicated improvised relationship drama, and although it’s still early stages and apparently changing every night, it already feels vital, and one to watch in a big way. It’s certainly the first work-in-progress I’ve seen to get a standing ovation.

Later that week at the Bill Murray, Fern Brady was also in WIP mode ahead of an Australian tour I Gave You Milk To Drink, with a collection of stories that found her relaying incidents from various TV sets and meetings with famous people. 

As a celebrity now herself, her confessional stories are coming out of a very different context than her old sordid tales of Bathgate, and she’s a relaxed and confident presence on stage. I found her hour strangely soothing, which is not something I remember feeling about previous shows of hers.

Half an hour later, Mat Ewins was similarly flirting with showbiz, which in his case translated to one of the most chaotic hours of entertainment I’ve ever seen.  Picture Noel Edmonds having an existential crisis while trying to singlehandedly run a gameshow on a soundstage the size of a toilet cubicle. 

The show is a trial of a new format provisionally titled Danger Money Game Show in which comedians compete in bizarre tech-assisted scenarios.  For this first test run, Sean McLoughlin and Harriet Kemsley were the contestants trying to carry out a jewel theft under the nose of Big Ron - aka John Kearns. 

Ewins has essentially created a mashup of the games he uses in his Fringe shows and the close-range improvising he does with Kearns on their podcast Microscope. Even with cameras falling over and tech malfunctioning, I can smell the TV pitch in the air: Taskmaster meets Banzai meets Whose Line Is It Anyway? But just in case that doesn’t come to pass, make sure you catch it in beta at the Bill Murray, it’s a riot.

Speaking of John Kearns, it’s a tradition of mine to attend 110% whenever possible. This is the occasional night he’s been doing with Pat Cahill for over a decade now, never failing to put me in a festive mood even at this time of year. 

The format is simple: Kearns stands, Cahill sits, they talk about whatever’s on their minds, Cahill performs a couple of songs and they get a guest on. It’s always uproarious.

 Some day I’ll be able to write full essays about Kearns and Cahill and the dynamic between them, but this week I was struck by the vaudeville quality of their pairing: Cahill’s line in bawdy but surreal wartime songs obviously brings the music hall to mind anyway, but it’s also there in the sputtering indignation of Kearns and the blithe inarticulateness of Cahill; the way they freewheel and rib the crowd. 

They trash talk their own show throughout but it's like Statler and Waldorf in the Muppets - the show making fun of itself is an essential part of its starriness. If you ever get a chance, this is the best way to see both of them. 

The final gig for this packed fortnight was a reprise for one of my absolute favourite shows of 2023, Johnny White Really-Really’s Catland. After many years as a fascinating outsider artist figure, it feels like White is gaining a little momentum as his legend spreads amongst London audiences and fellow comedians, many of whom seem to hold him in shamanic regard.

I’ve written with great fondness about this show before but this latest viewing just cemented it in my mind as one of comedy’s great works. On this showing, new themes jumped out at me, particularly the passing of time and the way real events, both mundane and momentous, take on the same imagined quality as they pass into memory. 

The effable gives birth to the ineffable, as my housemate put it, and the experience of the thing is just as real even if you concede the thing itself is invented - a state of mind that captures some of the special appeal of White's worldview. 

White’s primary school art teacher told him, ‘You’ll never make something of yourself because that’s not the way it works. You just change and change and change and then it’s all over.’

And while that’s undeniably true, part of his comedy is about making something of the change. This show finds majesty in the warp and weft.

Published: 26 Jan 2024