Tim Harding endures a Katie Hopkins performance in the name of his comedy diary

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

I’ve always promised myself that one day I’d go and check out Comedy Unleashed, kind of in the same way that a suicide pact is technically a kind of promise. 

Andrew Doyle’s comedy night in Bethnal Green is the UK’s most prominent safe space for right-wing humour, hosting a mixture of regular circuit comics playing up their edginess and a sprinkling of GB News grotesques who genuinely couldn’t be booked in other comedy clubs, in equal part because a) no one likes them and b) they aren’t funny. At Comedy Unleashed, almost any act can be assured of a warm reception by an audience imagining themselves part of the resistance.

That’s not to say that you can’t be funny and right-wing. I’ve laughed at sets by Geoff Norcott, Garrett Millerick, Tania Edwards and plenty of others, even if they’re rarely my favourite acts on the bill, but generally, in my (unfortunately extensive) experience, right-wing comedy struggles on an equal footing for a few different reasons. 

Conservative comics tend to be ‘old school,’ less inventive and more limited in their choice of topics. Comedy needs the element of surprise to be effective, being surprising entails saying something new, and it’s harder to say something new if your whole raison d’etre is ‘things should go back to how they used to be’.

Put a bunch of them all on the same bill and you quickly realise that most of their material entails just listing things they don’t like, as is the case here with JoJo Sutherland, Cressida Wetton and Mags McHugh. The one exception for this International Women’s Day special is Blank Peng, who plays into some very dark stereotypes about China but with more skill and a whimsical tone.

Less whimsical: far-right grifter Katie Hopkins, whose rancid set creates visible teeth-gritting and flinching, even among the gang of self-identified Terfs on a girl’s night out from hell. In crafting her comedic persona, Hopkins has bizarrely ended up as a kind of female Roy Chubby Brown impersonator, complete with dress sense; coming out of her mouth, all his old gear about fishy vaginas takes on an air of slightly tragic self-loathing. 

This is the prelude for stuff that gets much, much worse, along exactly the lines you would expect. Although I would obviously recommend steering well clear of her, whatever your comedic or political alignment, it’s a sad and strange thing to see in person. I don’t think the audience find it funny exactly but they do a lot of laughing – a case of dogs laughing at whistles.

Hopefully I can now talk about Angela Barnes without tarring her by proximity. Normally I would prefer something a little more adventurous than her charming but straightforward tour show Angst, at the Leicester Square Theatre, but the night after Comedy Unleashed my experience took on an almost misty-eyed quality. How good to be reminded that normal people are kind and generous and celebrate differences.

To pull back for a second, Barnes’s show is mostly about ageing, about reckoning with the changes that ageing brings and learning to see it as more than just a succession of slowly closing doors. An advocate in her middle age for feeling the fear and doing it anyway, Barnes has a number of very good routines here about performing for a nudist camp, her appearance on World’s Most Dangerous Roads, and some fascinating material on her synaesthesia – for her, concepts have colours and thoughts have a real-world backdrop depending on their theme. Very cool stuff, although sometimes hard to make comedy out of an experience most people can barely imagine, let alone relate to.

Almost in spite of her unique brain, her comedy is sometimes down-to-earth to a fault, and it’s easy to get a little weary of the nostalgia-baiting in this show, but the solidity of her craft and the positivity of her outlook provided a much-needed midweek boost.

Finally, for something more my usual speed, the NYC comedian known only as Pierce has uploaded his new show Frog Unlocked to YouTube, in which he escapes from handcuffs and dissects a frog live on stage.

I don’t know if he’s really well known enough to be considered a cult comedian, but lord willing he’ll get there one day. This show reminded me of no one so much as the beloved Mark Silcox in its informational, deadpan tone, but where Silcox is as calm and placid as an Easter Island head, Pierce is hurried and harried, flashing up complex biological and cosmological diagrams on the overhead projector, making meaningless connections extremely rapidly like a substitute biology teacher going through a manic episode. He doesn’t have the big laugh lines of someone like Dan Licata; he’s talking in his own comedic language.

There’s a lengthy video in the middle of the special where picks padlocks left by lovers on the Brooklyn Bridge and then melts them down to make a knuckle duster. There are a couple of long, genuinely impressive poems. 

It’s all rather curious, but I love that comedians like him are using YouTube as a home for their weird shit made in small rooms, not just their polished Netflix auditions. Fascinating that Williamsburg hipsters have found their way back around to Fringe performance art – personally I’m here for it.

Published: 14 Mar 2025