Tim Harding's comedy diary

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

I was too young to have witnessed the chaotic sketch shows of The Pajama Men firsthand, so with the new storytelling show from ex-member Shenoah Allen, Bloodlust Summertime, I’m left to make sense of the biography behind the art without seeing the art itself.

It’s easy to see where the makings of a clown might come from in this loose collection of personal anecdotes, though, riddled as they are with grotesques who also happen to be beloved family members, and bizarre experiences that ride the line between ridiculous and terrifying.

Long before he was an influential sketch comedian and creative partner of Nina Conti, Allen was growing up in the 1980s in New Mexico as the son of two hippies. Living in the school where his Dad was the headmaster, he stared down trouble down when it found him, which was often, in the form of acid overdoses, predatory police officers, and one memorable episode where a bodybuilder suffers a paranoid break and begins to believe Allen’s father is Satan incarnate. There’s a lot of darkness here as well: violence, sexual assault, even attempted murder.

Allen’s tales are full of the odd coincidences, details and twists that mark out true stories, and he tells them well, but the show is just that – a collection of anecdotes and occurrences – rather than any cohesive statement. 

The laughs are frequent but incidental – for stand-up fans it’s a bit of a shift in gear towards a David Sedaris-style comic monologue. It seems like a missed opportunity that the potential hooks for a satisfying structure are ignored, most clearly when the narrative reaches a natural crescendo only to continue rambling on for another 15 minutes of unrelated bits and bobs. Although presented as a finished show, at this stage it feels like raw material waiting to be pointed in any particular direction.

In the same Soho Theatre room later on, the Creepy Boys were reprising their newcomer-nominated show Slugs from last year, a rare chance to see them in London. Sam Kruger and S.E. Grummett perform as a hyper-stylised clown act, purveying a kind of Eurotrance Shrek-core, moving very fast and using copious multimedia touches: music, props, costumes, nudity (if nudity can be considered a medium which I think it can) and, most effectively, puppetry via an overhead projector and a live video relay. All of it tends towards a loud, electronic squelchiness.

At a challenging pitch and volume, Grummett and Kruger proclaim that Slugs is ‘a show about nothing’, which is a little disingenuous given that it touches on many aspects of the queer experience, but it’s a description that feels of a piece with a certain nihilistic affect that might be borrowed from a German techno/sex club.

The writing tends to get swamped by the sounds and the lights, but underneath the razzle-dazzle, it’s a gruellingly self-conscious form of wackiness, predicated on a mixture of Drag Race groaners and ‘lolrandom’ mid-2000s meme humour. Speed, modernity and an engagement with internet culture needn’t necessarily stifle comedy – you can look to Lou Wall as a performer who works in a very similar mode but manages to make it funny - here, a muted audience response is handily rendered irrelevant by the constant noise.

In the sheer craft that’s gone into their music and OHP puppetry (as well as the land acknowledgement at the end of the hour), the Creepy Boys show their hand as performers who care deeply; their veneer of cool doesn’t really suit them temperamentally, they should be doing theatre shows.

As a post-script to this one, in cross-referencing my experience with reviews of Slugs from the Fringe, I recognised almost none of what was described. I think there’s a chance this might be a very different show going under the same name.

Finally, only a few weeks after their incredible collaboration The Duel, Sam Campbell and Paddy Young realised a long-held dream of turning the Bill Murray into a bring-and-buy sale in their new format Floggers.

Dressed in cheap blazers over improvised fat suits, Young and Campbell crammed themselves onto the tiny stage along with Dan Rath, Horatio Gould and Mark Silcox in supporting roles. The rules for entry were simple: bring £70 in cash and an item to sell. That plus the ticket price would provide you with your chance to see two of the world’s funniest men facilitate the trading of objects including a set of dining room chairs, a wooden milking stool, and a haunted puppet stolen from the estate of Serge Gainsbourg. 

By the time the fucking about was finished, only about six transactions actually took place on stage, mostly between members of the front few rows. But in the darkness towards the back of the room, a kind of shadow economy sprung up, and furtive deals were rife. I unfortunately did not manage to shift my velvet pot plant, but I did score a rotary telephone made of bones for the low, low price of £30 in cash.

Upon taking possession of the item I was overcome by a kind of Gollum instinct that caused me to flee the scene with my prize, neglecting to find out where it came from or even the name of the man who sold it to me. Now I suppose I’ll never know, and that’s the magic of Floggers.

Published: 9 Mar 2026