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

In comedy it sometimes feels like there’s a taboo in looking backwards. ‘Comedy ages like milk’ etc, and the constant evidence that what we fondly remember as the good old days might not have been so good for performers and audiences who weren’t straight white men. 

You could also argue there’s something inherently ephemeral about comedy: there’s a fundamental truth to the phrase, ‘you had to be there’ as applied to humour; it never hits so sweet the second time.

So why this longing inside me – seemingly now reflected in the culture at large – to see the classics that I missed out on the first time round? Apparently it’s called anemoia, a nostalgia for a time that you never experienced, and it’s a side-effect of listening to too many podcast interviews with comedians where they describe their wild early days of drinking too much and taking incredibly weird concept shows up to Edinburgh.

Or more realistically, it’s the side effect of treating stand-up as an artform and an auteur’s medium. If you care about someone’s art, it’s usually interesting to you how they came to be the artist that they now are: how their craft and their approach to their themes developed over time. What were they like as a younger person? Was their energy different? Were their influences more prominent? Were they less sure of themselves? And in the case of comedy specifically, how has their sense of humour changed over time? Have they gotten more or less satirical, or surreal, or down-to-earth, and why? 

Looking at someone’s work and recognising the same patterns in jokes or ideas come up time after time is just as interesting as noticing when a shift in thinking occurs.

Recently it feels like there’s a bit of a tidal shift happening, as some comedians have been excavating and re-examining older work. It makes sense as an approach to labour: if you have older work that you’re still proud of, but your audience has grown significantly since you performed it, why not make it available in some way? 

In most other forms of media, it’s pretty much a given that you’ll be able to access the early work of artists that you have an interest in. It’s also a great way to stay on an audience’s radar without submitting yourself to the churn of creating a new Fringe show every year. Props, ideas and structural innovations that you worked hard on can be profitably mined rather than discarded.

So in the last few years I’ve been delighted to see, for example, John-Luke Roberts performing his older shows on rotation at the Fringe, and Elf Lyons bringing her bird trilogy to the Soho Theatre. The best show I saw all year was Trygve Wakenshaw and Barnie Duncan restaging Different Party, which was originally performed in 2017. 

The common factor to most of these revivals are that they’re from comedians on the artier or more theatrical end of the spectrum, and it’s true that re-using old material probably makes less sense if you’re a comedian who primarily talks about what’s happened to you over the previous year, but even then, I, for one, would be interested! When Richard Herring performed all eleven of his previous shows in 2015, part of the conceptual fun was seeing a middle-aged man perform as if he was still single, childless and in his early thirties. There’s hard-earned pathos to that, if nothing else.

Something else that happened in 2015 was that Joseph Morpurgo first performed Soothing Sounds For Baby, which went on to become the white whale of shows I missed, partly because everyone I know with good taste said it was the greatest show they’d ever seen, and partly because the first Morpurgo show I managed to catch, 2017’s Hammerhead, was the greatest show I’D ever seen.

I honestly can’t think of an occasion where I’ve been so excited for a show as when I learned Morpurgo was bringing Soothing Sounds back for a two-week run at Soho Theatre. But how can a show even begin to live up to those kinds of expectations?

Well, it did. Or near as dammit, anyway. The answer I fear is in the effort. Soothing Sounds just feels worked on, more than 99.999 per cent of other shows. The conceit, wherein Morpurgo is being interviewed on Desert Island Discs, and uses the oddball album sleeves as the prompts for – essentially – sketches, allows for a lot of fun and variation, but Morpurgo has crammed every square inch of this thing with jokes, twists and interesting staging choices. 

It certainly has its share of inspired moments – the special move he pulls in the A.A. Milne segment was a bit of magic I’ll never forget, and made me laugh like a baby experiencing peekaboo for the first time – but more than the inspiration, what persists is the sense of the show’s construction as finely wrought silver: every part of it has been given the attention it needs to become funnier and more beautiful. The intermission slides that Morpurgo displays while he changes costumes have more ideas in them than most full hours.

Part of its force comes from Morpurgo’s slightly unassuming presence at the centre, a figure who can disappear with ease into the constantly evolving scenarios of strangeness that he births from the album covers. 

This is not the work of a big personality who might struggle to hide their light, and it helps that we don’t know much about him – he’s more like an octopus or a type of laughing gas that can expand in all directions at once, and it means he can get into comedic crevices we’ve never seen before. How do you come up with the idea of repurposing your Google Maps route to the venue as an audience singalong? There are connections being made here that feel so far beyond the obvious comedic choice that you imagine Morpurgo trapped in a cave, working on this one show for a hundred years.

It’s becoming easy to overlook how much work must have gone into turning Kirsty Young into Morpurgo’s interlocuter, all achieved through audio editing alone. When Luke McQueen used the same conceit this year for his (excellent) show Comedian’s Comedian, he was able to use AI to puppeteer the voice of Stuart Goldsmith, which worked well, but it’s more impressive to realise how Morpurgo has had to adapt his script to fit the audio available to him.

So, safe to say I loved it, and loved connecting all the little threads backwards to see which shows had been influenced by it. It was nice to see him sell out the whole run in short order, and even nicer to see he’s got a new show coming next year. 

I hope Morpurgo can be a trailblazer in that regard as well, providing an inspiration and a model in encouraging other acts to play their classics. Let’s see the shows that John Kearns won his famous double awards for, the weird sketch stuff of Phil Wang or Alex Horne, or the iconoclastic early Fringe shows of Bridget Christie. 

I heard Mat Ewins did a show called Gagtanamo Bay where he pretended to be an improv quartet who got killed in a bus disaster or something. Maybe let’s start there.