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

One of the low-key most exciting dates on the comedy calendar for me is the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, despite the fact that I’ve never been. 

What I love is the advance dispatches from Chortle – reviews of people I’ve never heard of that will hopefully bring their shows to UK shores at some point. For whatever reason, antipodean comedy has the greatest hit rate for me of any national offering. This would be the case even if they had only given us Sam Campbell and Dan Rath, but there’s so many more. Aaron Chen, Tom Walker, Demi Lardner, Aunty Donna, Takashi Wakasugi, Anne Edmonds, Guy Montgomery, Zoe Coombs Marr, Alexei Toliopoulos, David Correos… the list is too long to properly get into but suffice to say they’re killing it.

So when Chortle posts a five-star MICF review, my ears prick up, which means by my calculations that my ears have been fully pricked for 387 days between this site’s review of Celia Pacquola’s I’m as Surprised As You Are, and getting to actually see it for myself at Soho Theatre. 

It’s her first time performing in the UK in nine years and she hasn’t kept up much of a profile over here, which may explain why the audience is a little sparse and predominantly Australian. Although I did notice Jessica Fostekew in attendance, which for me is a very good omen and proved to be a bellwether for Pacquola’s efficient, impeccably crafted dispatches from motherhood. 

In common with a lot of mums, there’s a practical, unyielding self-possession here that informs a shared comic sensibility. If Pacquola wasn’t a mum already, she would have to become one, which is partly what this show is about.

Partly it’s a hefty life update, detailing how Pacquola won Dancing With The Stars, fell in love with a man in lockdown whom she’d never met, and went on to marry him and have a baby within only a few months of meeting him for the first time. 

Maybe this is unusual for me to say as a cis man, but I always enjoy stand-up about pregnancy and giving birth. Not for me the comedy of relatability; what I like is when straightforward comics talk about extreme experiences, and Pacquola’s story about milking herself in a public toilet certainly qualifies. 

There are some big laughs in stretches like this, but she’s surprisingly moving as well, on the topic of just how difficult she found the early stages of motherhood. I enjoyed her solid storytelling and adept wrongfooting without ever quite falling in love. No frills stand-up is great and all… but also… I kind of like the frills.

Along similar lines, British-Nigerian comic and self-described ‘retired criminal’ Nabil Abdulrashid, the youngest black comedian to ever perform at the Hammersmith Apollo, was bringing his new show Urban Battuta to the Leicester Square Theatre.

For this, my first exposure to Abdulrashid, what most surprised me was not his straight-down-the-line style of comedy, but the complexity of his personal history and political outlook. He’s a bit of a study in contradictions: cuddly and genial as a teddy bear, he also has some ‘bad man tings’ in his history and talks about how he presents as intimidating to those who don’t know him because of his size and his race. 

The son of a doctor and an advocate for women’s health in Nigeria, he grew up all around the world. Rich neighbourhoods in Washington, martial arts in Nigeria, knife crime and gang culture in South London. An empathetic, politically conscious champion of social good, he nevertheless describes himself as ‘a recovering misogynist’ and ‘not a feminist’ on postcolonial grounds.

It’s a heady stew to fit into an hour of stand-up, and the show ends up vacillating heavily between its cerebral thematic concerns of the way we carry the preconceptions of others with us, and the funnier but more schematic bridging sections that are largely about amusing Encounter he had while visiting Australia. 

His rich personal history, and the sense that he’s reconciling a complex set of cultural influences, are clearly his most interesting facets as a performer, with the resulting comedy being a little less adventurous than you might hope. 

His take on airport security is perfectly fine, but you need to exert a little more effort to make hay out of such well-trodden topics. It’s when he embraces his position as an erudite outsider (like in a brilliant act-out on different news networks’ reaction to the death of Osama Bin Laden) that he becomes more thrilling.

Finally this week, American comic Rory Scovel made his Soho Theatre debut with three nights of his tour show Should I Live Here. Rocking a little moustache, greying hair and a reversible jacket, Scovel is the archetypal American ‘hot dad’ comedian, and much of his set paints a familiar picture of a domestic life in which he is inferior to his wife in every way, fully aware of his shortcomings as a husband and father but making no effort to change them.

 In his laidback excavation of the warts of the American male psyche, he’s most reminiscent of Louis CK, and perhaps can assume his place in the culture following CK’s cancellation, although I will say he’s less interested in being trenchant: one of the interesting features of this gig is that he teases the topic of the genocide in Gaza a couple of times without ever actually tackling it, instead settling for some pretty superficial jabs at Elon Musk and RFK. 

He’s clearly a smart, humanistic and politically engaged comic – and fair enough it’s got to be one of the most difficult subjects to talk about comedically, but it seems odd to repeatedly mention it without mentioning it.

It's characteristic of a show with plenty of strong moments, but that ultimately lacked some of the punchiness that he must have up his sleeve. Extended routines on the crucifixion and getting a vasectomy from a hot nurse feel tried-and-tested to their detriment, but he unquestionably elevates the material, mostly through his fantastic facility for act-outs. 

He takes scenarios like the bureaucracy of the crucifixion and worries at them like a foxhound, in a way that’s performed brilliantly without ever being actorly, consistently finding new angles and voices in a scene. He’s a great improviser as well, spinning a very unexpected (and as usual, nonsensical) audience interjection into one of the night’s best routines. 

Given that hidden talent, it’s odd that his set allowed no space for crowdwork. He’s obviously a performer with a lot of firepower, which this show keeps largely in reserve. It makes for a genial but somewhat disposable night at the stand up.