Another massive night of comedy with yet another full house at the Screaming Blue Murder club at the Royal and Derngate, with daredevil host Dan Evans on top form coping with another unlikely bunch of customers. Every other person in the two front rows appeared to be a police officer, which made for a curious dynamic. Or, if they weren’t police, they were charity workers. Fortunately they all had good senses of humour!
Our first act – and the only one we’d seen before – was Otiz Cannelloni, whose act has a rather old-fashioned music hall/variety feel to it, but it’s none the worse for that – in fact, there’s probably too little of that around nowadays. He has a cunning blend of comedy and magic – and a charming rabbit to assist him with some of his tricks – and lots of silly comic throwaway lines. He’s a great example of if ain’t broke, don’t fix it, as his act was pretty much the same as before, but the material works really well, so why not?
Next up was Kat Geborys – who, probably quite wisely, shortens it to Kat to make it simpler for the rest of us. I was going to call her Proudly Polish, but in fact she doesn’t seem to have much complimentary to say about her native country – perhaps doing the slightly xenophobic material so that we don’t have to think it for ourselves; Poland is a country that she maintains (allegedly) can’t distinguish between being gay from being a paedophile, for instance. A lot of her act centres on her being – shall we say – sexually frank and direct, and there’s a lot of good material there. She has excellent timing, a fun stage presence and went down well with the audience.
Our headliner was Adam Bloom, a comic who’s been around for some time and it’s criminal that we haven’t seen him before – and we’ve missed a lot. Cleverly self-deprecating about his appearance, he delivers his excellent material with sure fire confidence; a mixture of traditional kids/marriage/divorce type observations and some more daring stuff – I really enjoyed his sequence about virtual reality sex. Great use of callbacks, and he ends his act with a very successful round of you give me a subject and I’ll give you a joke about it. A great end to a terrific evening.
Next Screaming Blue Murder is on 24th March and – guess what – it’s sold out again!