Tim Harding's comedy diary

Reviewer Tim Harding gives a rundown of the best comedy he's been watching in London - and experiencing via a video game - recently...

Comedy in video games has an interesting history. Although it’s not a mode and a medium with strong associations to one another, the early days of game design were often spearheaded by lone men with large beards and NHS glasses who spent their whole lives marinating in Monty Python. 

Surreal humour was often an important component, especially in text and puzzle-based adventures, which tended to be designed by creators with more of a narrative focus. The Monkey Island games, Day of the Tentacle, Discworld and Simon the Sorcerer all shared a dry, offbeat sensibility. That sensibility has been largely missing from modern gaming as puzzle adventures became an endangered species, although the popularity of Disco Elysium did a lot to remind audiences of the genre’s unique pleasures. 

One such unique pleasure is Thank Goodness You’re Here from Coal Supper, a new indie game essentially set inside the Northern wave of (what I’m going to call) ‘social surrealist' comedy and featuring many of its stars delivering uniformly excellent voice work including Chris Cantrill, Jack Evans and Em Humble, as well as a small role for Matt Berry. 

You play a taciturn little yellow man dispatched to the town of Barnsbury to help the residents with their problems. In terms of gameplay, you can move, you can jump and you can slap things. There’s no real puzzle element, just a shifting landscape of cause and effect. You never know what effect your slap is going to have and you don’t need to know because your only option is to slap, so it’s really more of an interactive animated sitcom than any kind of mental or mechanical challenge, but on that level it’s one of the funniest sitcoms I’ve seen in years.

Its pleasures lie in wandering around the beautifully-drawn town – rich in fag ends, wrappers and discarded chips – and listening to the burbling townspeople talk nonsense. This is the north of Bob Mortimer, The Delightful Sausage and WallerFM, and it’s a joy to inhabit. 

Although the wandering around can sometimes feel a little aimless, you’re never too far away from spilling a bowl of soup on an invalid, uncovering a rat society in the roof of a supermarket or a Dark Souls riff where you get trapped inside a nightmarish ham world. If you’re not too precious about the challenge element of video games, it’s a very funny way to kill a few hours.

Brynley Stent weirdly came all the way over from New Zealand in August without bothering with the Fringe. Her show Frigid, on at Soho Theatre at the start of the month, was a lightweight but fun little slice of homemade multimedia comedy about her disappointing sexual history, which includes getting the titular nickname in high school, losing her virginity to a gay man and spending her ‘slut years’ in a barely physical long-term relationship. 

Stent is a self-confessed theatre kid, and this show has a few theatre kid hallmarks in that it sometimes aims for entertainment and charm rather than belly laughs, but it really has more than enough of both to justify itself.

Despite knowing his name seemingly from the womb, I don’t have a huge amount of real-world experience with Frank Skinner. If I had any expectations at all when heading into 30 Years Of Dirt at the Gielgud Theatre, it was that he might be a little old-fashioned. And it wasn’t that he shattered those expectations exactly, he just made me question why that has to be a bad thing. 

This show felt like watching a sharpshooter do insane trick shots for 80 minutes, just straight up twirling his revolvers around the whole time. It’s actually a little miraculous how he fully inhabits and embodies his age and context without ever feeling retrograde or like his time has passed. 

He doesn’t shy away from his old man topics like how things used to be different back in the day, but makes his observations feel completely fresh. He’s absolutely correct to call himself a master craftsman – I’ve rarely felt in such good hands.

For anyone who wasn’t able to hit Edinburgh – as well as those who were – Stuart Laws and Turtle Canyon thoughtfully released The Debuts, a documentary that follows five comedians – Josh Jones, Amy Gledhill, Lily Phillips and Sikisa – across the ‘tightrope of mental health, professional success and alcohol poisoning’ that was the 2022 Fringe, the solo debut for all five comics. 

None of those acts are at all new to comedy, so the documentary is focused specifically on taking that next step into the true debutante experience: turning up, making a name for yourself, distinguishing yourself among a group of equally glamorous and hungry young professionals, all scrambling for status and rewards. 

What the documentary spotlights well is the psychological toll of immersing yourself in that scramble for an extended period – a lesson that could probably apply to most professions. A lot of time is spent with the comics reacting to good and bad reviews, and bouncing around in the emotional tumble dryer of award nominations, and both the highs and lows are captured with candidness. 

You get the sense though, that Laws may be a little too close to this operation, and specifically that following his good friends may have hindered the doc’s capacity for insight. 

New Yorker Anthony Devito is an interesting candidate. An outsider to the Fringe rigmarole and a more earnest figure than his British colleagues, he’s able to convey his emotional state clearly and articulate the changes he’s having to make to his show in order to fit in with the Edinburgh style. His comments on how audiences react to his show as ‘removed’ entertainment – a comic monologue to be appreciated as a whole rather than an evolving back and forth with an audience – get at something interesting about the specific evolution of the Fringe show as opposed to other forms of stand-up.

Unfortunately, he isn’t part of the same social circle as Laws and the other subjects, so he disappears from the film for extended periods while the other comics are given space to go nuts in a slightly less perspicacious way. It’s not that the contribution of the British comics is less valuable, but they’re too far inside the machine to have much perspective on it.

It's a little sad how it works, really. With all the focus given to nominations and reviews, there’s almost no mention of the comics’ impact on individual punters. Audiences are evaluated more in terms of how they service the material (‘they were good tonight’ / ‘they were a bit quiet’) than in their enjoyment, or how it touched them. 

I don’t envy comedians the rawness of their experience at the Fringe and I’m sure I wouldn’t handle it any better. Life is tough in the rat surge.

Published: 30 Aug 2024