Tim Harding's comedy diary

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

If you write about comedy, it’s not unusual for a publicist to turn down your request to review a show for one reason or another, but this is the first time I’ve had a request turned down because the show has too many good reviews already. 

Such is the consensus around Sarah Keyworth’s 2023 hour My Eyes Are Up Here, which was nominated at Edinburgh, won at Melbourne, and is now off to conquer America. I took my mum to the performance at the Oxford Playhouse as part of her ongoing education in 21st-Century gender studies, and am here to add my explicitly unnecessary thoughts to the pile.

No surprise, I loved it (and so did my mum). Biographical specificities and whether you ‘relate’ to the comic aside, Keyworth is a crowd-pleaser on a grand scale, and is reminiscent of no one so much as Frank Skinner. There’s a Midlandish earthiness there, able to straddle Northern forthrightness and Southern comedy-of-manners, and a common touch, but also a growing mastery of storytelling. 

My Eyes… is very funny, but the deftness with which Keyworth organises the narrative provides an outsized emotional impact. There are twin strands here of their stories of growing up and their relationship with their mother, and their decision to get top surgery a couple of years ago. 

As an audience, you feel the connection between these strands before it’s made explicit – Keyworth skilfully walks you up to an emotional revelation several times before letting the penny drop, and it comes together in a torrent. They’re really at the top of their game.

Over at the Museum of Comedy, two newer voices were working on works in progress for their debut shows, and both showing a lot of promise. As one half of Burger And A Pint, James Trickey won the Leicester Square Theatre’s Sketch-Off last year, but his stand-up is in a more traditional vein, leveraging his experiences as a British-Cambodian chartered accountant. 

He’s still fresh, but I was very taken with his ode to the pleasures of using an entire tube of tomato puree in one dish, and admired the ambition of trying to teach us about mathematical probability through the medium of rap. That’s all I want, really, to see people taking a big swing or two.

Rohan Sharma, on the same double bill, comes from a British Indian family from Hertfordshire, but his material pokes gentle fun at the vogue for earnest immigration stories. 

Sharma is a tricksy, slightly bashful PowerPoint comedian with a lot of goofy material on his favourite dictators and an infectious love of wrongfooting his audience, often luring participants into inescapable traps. Like Trickey, he’s still in the early stages of finding his own voice but the ingredients for an exciting and inventive comedy experience are all present and correct.

Finally, a beautiful little improv happening from the lovely David Elms, who I saw most recently in Nick Mohammed’s A Christmas Carol(ish). Elms has been running his occasional hour David Elms Describes a Room for about ten years now, and is soon making the jump from The Free Association to the Soho Theatre, which will hopefully open up the experience to a new audience. 

The format of the hour is that Elms spends about 50 minutes meticulously imagining a room with the help of his audience, who are called upon to provide granular specifics on every single piece of décor, from the items on the shelves to the upholstery on the furniture. 

Having populated the room with (on our night) paddling pools, novelty Monopoly boards, old dogs, wing-backed chairs and tears in the spacetime continuum, the final ten minutes consists of an improvised sketch in which Elms makes his way through the room that we’ve imagined together, interacting with what we’ve described and also attempting to embody, in character, the contradictions of the person that might inhabit this strange space.

As a host, Elms brings us to a place where no one need fear to contribute. Arch but unfailingly gentle, he reminds you of a kindly administrator of some sort – a really good funeral director perhaps, never overbearing with his jokes and his patient surprise at the contributions of the audience.

I’m fascinated to go again and see how the show changes in response to the audience, particularly how Elms designs the soul of his character to reflect their surroundings. The bits of business with the paddling pool and the dog are great, but I love the idea that the room comes together somehow, creating its own distinct occupant with every performance. Where improv can often feel disposable or incidental, Elms’ rooms are built to last.

Published: 19 Jan 2025