Tim Harding's comedy diary

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

Does anyone else find that festive traditions get more important as you get older? The lust for presents fades away, which is probably healthy, and is replaced by a lust for things that remind you of how you used to feel about presents, back when you still possessed the capacity for excitement. 

For the last few years, my festive comedy treat has been 110% Christmas with Kearns and Cahill, but it seems like that’s being rested this year, so instead, let’s go all in on Ratmas.

Ratmas is a festival whose origins are lost to the mists of last year, but as you probably already know, it’s that happiest season where the podcast Three Bean Salad reads out disgusting rat stories sent in by their listeners. And this year, for the first time, Ratmas could be celebrated in person at Kings Place with the three beans Mike Wozniak, Benjamin Partridge and Henry Paker.

It was the second of two one-off live shows being put on by the podcast that day, with the first being Partridge’s occasional quiz format Bonjo’s House of Pain. 

I consider that subsidiary to Ratmas but went along anyway and didn’t regret it. Those three guys are simply always funny when you put them together, and really only need the loosest possible format restrictions in order to shine.

The House of Pain is predictably not quite flimsy enough, as any attempt to corral Paker into rules and timetables will inevitably fail. The man’s more distractible and distracting than Daniel Kitson at his finest, and his tangents are always gold, so it’s no surprise to anyone except Ben Partridge when we’re two-thirds of the way through the 75 minute time slot and have only completed the first round of the quiz. 

Partridge’s frustration at Paker’s lack of focus is all part of the Three Bean chemistry, but I hope it doesn’t truly cause him distress; the waffling is very much the point with these guys.

On to the Ratmas event proper, held a few hours later, which brought some of the festive spirit that I’d been craving. Mike, Ben and Henry were all in novelty Christmas hats, Isy Suttie was there to share a couple of disgusting rat stories of her own, and there was live piano accompaniment from Freddie Tapner, to soundtrack an improvised, rat-themed version of The 12 Days of Christmas that we returned to throughout. 

As the first year of a new tradition, it secured a place in my heart, something about disgusting rat stories in a festive context felt simultaneously like entertaining counter-programming and genuinely apropos; the rat I suppose being a ‘traditional’ presence on British soil and writhing inside British walls.

Not averse to writhing and gnawing himself, Irish comedian Mike Rice – the self-styled ‘nasty character’ and ‘cruel little man’ – had a Big Show at the Shepherds Bush Empire that felt like a homecoming for his podcast Mike & Vittorio’s Guide to Parenting, with current co-host Vittorio Angelone and frequent collaborator Rob Moriarty both providing support. 

Rice’s persona – bullish toxicity leavened with a certain self-conscious folksiness – is very well-honed by this point, and even at his relatively young age he can more than justify shows in big theatres. His use of language is so wonderful that he can bring you along on some of his more juvenile tendencies (of which he has many) by suffixing it with a phrase like ‘…As I said to a worm in my garden.’ Alright, goddamnnit, I’m in! What is it that you wanted to say about Hitler and paedophiles?

His new show is very funny and very accomplished, but – and not to put him in a box – I missed the rolling fields of Ireland in his anecdotes. Shifting his focus slightly more towards his current lifestyle and interests in London is probably a necessary evolution but his tales of growing up on the farm were always his most distinctive numbers.

Since The Paddock closed its doors and shot its horses a couple of years ago, I’ve been missing a space in London that intersects comedy and alternative animation. 

At ground level, animation and stand-up have a lot of overlap as vehicles for the delivery of humour. And there are shared practitioners as well; more than you’d think. There was Alasdair Beckett-King’s legendary self-animated tour trailer, the incredible work of Sophie Koko Gate (now a Sam Campbell collaborator and performing live in her own right) and the pre-sketch comedy career of Sam O’Leary to name but a few. 

Sitting down to one of the excellent short film anthology evenings at the London International Animation Festival is a little like a mixed bill night, with a dozen or so oddballs dropping in to demonstrate an aesthetic and expound on their worldview as it relates to ducks or smartphones or whatever.

I saw two showcases, From Absurd To Zany at the beautiful Garden Cinema, and Late Night Bizarre at the Horse Hospital, which are definitely the two to catch if you’re interested in cutting-edge comedy animation. For a little tasting platter of my favourites, from the first anthology I’d start with Fun Kitai Furai Dei, a puppetry animation by Hunter Allen for the lovely, unusually melancholy Jazz Emu song. Peter Hair, by Arthur Studholme and Cosmo Wellings is a nice little imaginative act-out of what it's like to be a hair on the front line of a balding man’s head, and Sacha Beeley’s Robert Yoghurt is a simple but very funny bit of flash animation about a little boy obsessed with yoghurt.

In the second anthology, Late Night Bizarre, things got a little weirder. Keith Pakiz’s Basketball Explorer: The Shot Doctor felt like a classic bit of adult swim animation and was the hardest I laughed at anything I saw. Gabriele Favaretto’s Chasing Lip Balms was very strange indeed, featuring a horrible CGI rabbit man affectionately voicing everyone’s greatest fears and insecurities in an endless dark room. 

And finally, every time I go to LIAF, I feel like I see one thing that substantially raises the bar on the limits of human creativity, and this time that was Luis Nieto’s mindblowing UM, a mythic saga of duelling bird demons filtered through an insane Chinese AI. It’s just incredible! How do they even think of this stuff to visualise it in the first place?? If I knew, I'd be staring into space even more than I do already. Or at least more productively…

Published: 10 Dec 2025