Now that 2018 is in full swing, it’s great to see that the Screaming Blue Murder comedy nights are back with several superb line-ups between now and May. Our genial host Dan Evans is also back in situ, this week trying to keep control of a very motley crew. Even before the show started the front couple of rows had turned into party central with endless selfie competitions, and a challenge to see which girl could manage the loudest cackle.
It wasn’t long before Dan identified her, and indeed she jumped up on stage with him at one point; poor lamb got a terrible fright (him, not her.) Our audience also boasted the man with the coolest job in the world, training the seals at Woburn Wildlife Park, and a firefighter who was having difficulty with Dry January. He felt embarrassed to mention it but we gave him a good cheer anyway.
So on with the acts, and some new ones for us; first up was Matthew Osborn, whom we’d not seen before. He’s quite a dapper little chap, with some brilliant material, and that’s not just the cut of his suit. Imagine the Daily Mail’s Quentin Letts doing stand-up. He has a wonderful confident delivery, happy to take it all at his own pace; and he trades on the fact that he looks and sounds totally respectable and then delivers some powerful and rather rude punchlines. I loved all his sex jokes – so much more inventive than the average comedian’s. His reaction to the girl who told him to treat her like a whore, what happened when he went down on one knee, and also when the Jehovah’s Witness tried to open the boot of his car – all really clever stuff. Very impressed, and he went down a storm!
Our second act, and the only one we’d seen before, back in September 2014 was Iszi Lawrence. She creates a lot of humour based on her lesbian chic looks and her posh heritage, and has some great material about being bisexual, the unglamorous sexuality. To be fair, it was pretty much the same routine that we saw last time, but it works well, so I guess why change it? She sets up a slightly intriguing and challenging rapport with the audience but her quirky approach appealed to us and we very much enjoyed her set.
Our headline act, who apparently has been on the scene for decades, but I’ve never come across him, was Brendon Burns. He has attack by the bucketload, and quite an aggressive delivery but his material is superb. He’s a full-on agenda comic; pro-equality, he sees men who describe themselves as feminists as deliberately invading one of the few areas in life where women can take control. Much of his comedy is about sex but approaching it from angles that you wouldn’t normally consider funny (that’s the material, not the sex). He has great material about how teenagers today, in this Internet porn age, are being told in sex education to have realistic expectations from sex – definitely food for thought. At the end of his act, on the one hand you feel like you’ve been aggressively diatribed against; on the other you have the beauty of insightful, revelatory comedy. Most impressive, and he got a great reaction from the audience.
Next one is on 16th February. See you there!