Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Mark Thomas acknowledges that he creates two sorts of shows: theatrical ones that win him awards and stand-up ones that are half the ticket price and twice as funny. Black & White is firmly in the latter camp.

Free from too many constraints of structure, he’s having fun just cracking jokes – albeit always at the expense of the venal incompetents at the top of the Conservative party, and those who enable them. 

For an opening routine, he combines the proudly working-class comedy of the Victorian music halls with his radical policies, like a sort of Max Millertant, if you will. Later we hear Les Dawson’s take on Liz Truss – with Thomas a better mimic than you might expect.

The bin fire of the Boris Johnson regime has given the comic plenty to mock, with the cringe of his quoting Kermit The Frog at the United Nations achieving near peak satire. It’s fast and funny for 20 minutes, packed full of proper, hard-hitting punchlines before the pace slows as he subtly shifts the focus from the Tories being a Laughing Stock to the real consequences that 12 years of their rule has had.

Even in the sillier segments, he’s fuelled by an outraged anger, a passion that then comes into its own when talking about serious issues, such as the link between health and wealth, toxic immigration policy, the right to protest and strike under threat like never before and the Tories being quicker to protect statues than women. Everything is political in Thomas’s hands – even diabetes.

There’s a bit of soapboxing, but you’re never far from a sharp line. That's true even as the tone gets increasingly revolutionary, with Thomas predicting fuel riots and describing how the one per cent despise the working class, and just about hold their noses long enough to tolerate the middle class. This segment took a particularly hilarious detour tonight when one punter did a Sunak and confessed she’d never been in the home of a working-class person – an honesty which Thomas greeted with delighted incredulity rather than scorn. 

It’s typical of the lively, upbeat and inspiring energy that the comic brings to his work, expressing an optimism for change undimmed by recognition of how shit things have become. If only the official Opposition front bench could display a fraction of this positivity.

The hour ends up back where we started, in the music halls – right down to a singalong – and a shaggy dog story about Boris that might be more about the journey than the destination. But we have achieved Thomas’s aim for the show to be a post-lockdown celebration of ‘the simple act of being in a room together and toppling international capitalism’. 

• Mark Thomas: Black And White is at Stand 1 at 1.30pm tomorrow then on a UK tour in the autumn

Review date: 27 Aug 2022
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Stand 1