Jonny Sweet: Let's All Just Have Some Fun (And learn Something, For Once)
Live Review

As last year’s winner of the Edinburgh Comedy Award for best newcomer, the pressure was on Jonny Sweet to return with something special. And he has.

With a boundless energy and an upper-middle-class naive joy, Sweet greets and hugs the audience members as they arrive. Twinkling with a good-natured exuberance he manages to put everyone immediately at ease even as he settles down on people’s laps for a rest. It is impossible not to warm to his foppish, charming character.

Sweet can barely contain his excitement as he restrains giggles and proudly announces that for the duration of the hour he will be presenting a lecture on the warship the HMS Nottingham. He quickly launches his PowerPoint presentation and it becomes immediately clear he is not joking as he ploughs into the ins and outs of the plumbing system onboard the Destroyer.

This is an brilliantly slick and clever show. Sweet is an incredibly endearing host even when he is entering into hand-to-hand combat with a gentleman from the front row to demonstrate some of the training the crew of the Nottingham had to go through.

It is difficult to tell when Sweet is making up details for comic effect or just expanding on the truth of the history of the old ship. Whichever it is he has managed to achieve what should be impossible to make water tanks and cubit measurements very, very funny.

Anyone that thinks there is no way that Sweet could have produced an hour of comedy on such a banal topic may be interested to know there is a twist which I am loathe to give away here. You'll just have to see the show to see if he manages it.

Sweet is a startling talent who has a seemingly endless potential to deliver even the most unusual projects, making him an extremely exciting act to look out for in the future.