Tim Harding's comedy diary

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

Comedy feels important in January, when many of us in London are gritting our teeth till warmer weather comes around, so it was nice to have a packed week as we hurdled ‘Blue Monday’ on the 20th. 

With comedians generally having a great instinct for counter-programming, there were lots of good options for comedy fans on the day itself, but I ended up opting for something slightly off the beaten track.

In The Dark is a regular listening party live event where audio editors share a collection of short clips – the results of their trawlings on a chosen theme. The effect is a bit like being a studio audience for This American Life. 

Following a successful debut outing last year, radio editor Talia Augustidis has put together the second volume of Funny Sounds, simply a collection of audio recordings that made her laugh, shared on a day where everyone is down in the dumps.

It's a lovely evening, even when enjoyed at an uncomfortable right angle from the action, sitting in a photo booth at the back of the room because the Moth Club loves nothing more than not providing quite enough chairs. Augustidis’ wide-ranging display includes moments like a clip of two little girls explaining a disastrous haircut one of them gave the other; an old radio advert for Life of Brian; some Stéphane Borrel sound art that consists of people with unusual laughs braying over each other; and a sketch from Blue Jam. 

It’s a grab bag, but there’s a real art to selecting clips that play well in a live environment, and she manages it repeatedly. One section in particular, a segment from the podcast Love + Radio in which two Americans have phone sex with terrible British accents, absolutely brought the house down. I’ve been sharing it with friends ever since, which feels like a continuation of the show’s spirit. 

I’m very much in favour of shows like this, and Found Footage Festival, and Adult Film Club, where authorship and performance take a back seat to curation. What more democratic artform exists than sharing something you found funny?

The following evening, sketch group Crybabies were recording two episodes of their upcoming radio series Crybabies Present…, the pilot of which was released last year and was nominated for a Chortle award. They’re now back with a whole series of 30-minute self-contained comedy narratives in the mould of The Goon Show. Guys, it’s – it’s so good. I listened to a psychological thriller that mashed up Misery and Silence Of The Lambs with bawdy greetings cards, and a terrorism caper (I suppose that’s the best way to describe it) set at the famous Football World Cup, and it was the most I’ve laughed at anything for a very long time. These guys fire out gold like a baseball pitching machine.

For as much as radio ‘has the best pictures’ as my mum would say, the key to writing really good jokes for it is to take advantage of the fact that the audience can’t see, allowing the writer to unveil key information at the perfect moment – information that would have been unavoidably obvious in a visual medium. 

The single greatest joke on The Goon Show (‘It’s no good I’m going to have to get a pen and write all this down’ (IYKYK)) does it, and it’s a magic trick that the Crybabies pull off over and over again, using the medium’s restrictions for maximum impact. This will be appointment listening, no other way to say it.

Chloe Petts’ new show, How You See Me, How You Don’t has just been booked for a return to Soho Theatre in June and is a great one to take your friends to. 

Petts is moving into a fertile middle ground between indie cred and slick performance style, with her most confident hour to date, refining her approach to the questions of gender presentation and public perception that have been strung throughout her previous two shows. 

Here, the hook is how she dealt with the unpleasant trolling response to her appearance on Sky Sports, although it’s not a hook you’d want to hang a very big coat on, if you get my drift. 

Like many comics who become swallowed by the churn of searching for new material, she’s becoming vastly more skilled as a stand-up while, on an inverse axis, her stories are becoming less personal and interesting. 

Here, she suffers from a bit of celebrity creep, wherein her material is becoming more and more about how her television appearances have been going. A lot of (very good) crowdwork is bolstering a narrative that sometimes feels thin.

But also, you know what, crowdwork is popular because it’s fun, and the same goes for stories about being on TV. And Petts is nothing if not a fun night out. Interestingly, she talks explicitly in this show about an innate desire to be all things to all people – her greatest strength as a comic but also sometimes what holds her back.

Definitely not concerned with being all things to all people, Kate Cheka brought her show A Messiah Comes to the Soho Theatre for two nights following a well-received Edinburgh run and a Funny Women award. Cheka is a charismatic, high energy presence with a great voice (literally rather than figuratively), all of which made me wish that I responded to her show more positively.

For lack of a less cringey term for this collection of political alignments, Cheka is very woke – which is great; so am I – and I agreed very strongly with many of her points, although rarely to the point of laughter. 

While it’s peppered with some good personal material about family, sex life and living in Berlin, Cheka’s stated priority for her work is to spread her feminist and socialist talking points. 

It’s totally possible to make great, informative work along those lines, but Cheka’s slogans feel past their best – disruptive when they started doing the rounds on Twitter ten years ago, but now crying out for new phrasing, new perspectives, new energy; newness that they’re not finding in Cheka’s stand-up. 

There are one or two instances where she gets really spiky, with lines so pugilistic that they provoke a few gasps, but those are few and far between. More likely you’ll find yourself in a creaky singalong of Do They Know It’s Christmas hastily rewritten to include the phrase ‘Eat The Rich’. Given the political desperation of current times, this regurgitation doesn’t cut it.

Published: 31 Jan 2025