
'She's a comedian in complete control'
Tim Harding's comedy diary
Reviewer Tim Harding gives a rundown of the comedy he's been watching in London - in the last month.
I don’t envy the comics who schedule their Soho Theatre runs to immediately follow the Fringe. With its unique position as a comedic tastemaker and zeitgeist-definer, a comedian’s first run in the London venue is a big deal, but it must be difficult to find the energy for it after giving all of yourself to Edinburgh only a few weeks prior. Certainly as a spectator I often feel like I need a break in September, but after a few weeks the lure of comedy is too strong.
Toussaint Douglass scored a lot of buzz and a newcomer nomination in Edinburgh for his debut Accessible Pigeon Material, performed like a lounge singer with a very recently-sustained concussion.
It’s easy to forget the iridescence of the pigeon when it’s a bird so prone to drabness and squalor, and there’s something in that dichotomy that appeals to Douglass, who loves to mix the shiny and the pathetic. ‘I’d love to die alone,’ he says. ‘That’s why I’m in showbiz.’
It makes sense that, although he affects a long face and a monotone voice, he also has many of the mannerisms of an old-fashioned sparkly suit comedian, and occasionally lapses into jokes that feel as if they are from the same era, particularly during an extended section complaining about his wife’s veganism. And given the big promises about a show full of pigeon material and the Harry Hill energy with which he kicks off, it’s a little disappointing that the comic inventiveness is mostly sidelined for autobiographical and observational material. There’s a sense in which he might even have illustrated his points about neurodiversity more effectively through pigeon jokes than he has by confronting the issue head on.
But I don’t want to put a square peg into a round hole – Douglass is just a little more grounded than he first appears, and he’s good at what he does. The through-line about his grandmother and his family lineage has a plainspoken but beautiful emotionality, and he’s entertainingly pugilistic with the audience when channelling his father through a joke shop boxing puppet.
As these strong, disparate influences on his life are made clear, we begin to understand the complexity of the comedian we see before us, in all his awkwardness and splendour.
Manifesting a different kind of splendour, Lucy Pearman spends the entirety of Lunartic dressed as a huge silver circle, in character as the moon.
Pearman is an old favourite of mine. In the lineage of the likes of The Mighty Boosh, she’s a bonkers props-and-costumes comic who’s completely unsparing with the audience. Often her shows have a succession of bizarre characters, but here she’s decided that the moon is strong enough to carry it alone, and I’m not sure I agree.
Being the moon makes for a funny visual, but the Black Country (I think?) accent and the handful of mannerisms don’t add up to a memorable personality, and without a really strong character to hold it together, Lunartic becomes a string of unconnected prop gags with a lunar theming that’s more cosmetic than anything.
What this show retains in spades is the mischief that Pearman wreaks among her audience, enlisting their help over and over again for every little thing. There’s even one guy whose sole job is to lift her up and down from the stage, because she refuses to use the stairs but wants to get up and down every few minutes in her ridiculously cumbersome and awkward costume.
As in previous shows, she treads the line wonderfully to challenge her participants and bring out unexpected responses while keeping the room on side.
Australian comic – and another best newcomer nominee – Elouise Eftos is also wreaking havoc with Soho Theatre audiences, in a way that’s more likely to stick with you in the long nights of self-reflection that may or may not follow her show.
The show is called Australia’s First Attractive Comedian and it functions as a forum for Eftos to ask penetrating questions about whether as a female comedian she’s ‘allowed’ to be funny, hot and – crucially – totally unapologetic about those facts. And they are facts: the title might be tongue in cheek but Eftos’s level of conventional attractiveness and the self-possession with which she performs doesn’t give you the easy out of, for example, a clown performing a more exaggerated or grotesque version of sexual confidence.
As a British audience member, you might spend the first 20 minutes of this show waiting for the other shoe to drop. When is she going to say something self-deprecating so I can relax?? But she never does. Nor does she play the ditz, or lack self-awareness. Instead, she’s relentlessly high status and can back it up in all respects.
From this comic tension that never quite dissipates, a fascinating show emerges in which Eftos dismantles tall poppy syndrome and the cruel disjunction that society insists on valuing women for their looks but hates it when they own that value, preferring to see hotness as a transitive property that lends status to a woman’s partner.
Sections in which Eftos discusses the response to her material from other comics and women in the media might seem esoteric or gossipy, but they allow her to make some interesting asides about ‘girl code’ and how attractiveness as a concept has dug its claws back into popular feminism as it evolves. By owning and celebrating her looks, is she reclaiming something, or capitulating to patriarchy?
I could wang on for ages about this in a very uninformed way, so suffice to say it’s food for thought, and worth seeing with a friend so you can have these discussions afterwards. More than the dialectic, what impresses about Eftos is her incredible performance chops as a dancer, improviser, actor and physical comedian. You simply will never have heard a better cartoon double take noise come out of a human mouth, it’s a thing to behold.
Even though her confident, self-aggrandising persona is playing in a crowded swimming pool right now, and you can sometimes feel that in her joke-writing, it’s easy to see why she was nominated – she’s a comedian in complete control.
Finally, in brief, because I’ve written about it before, it was a joy as always to catch the finished version of John Tothill’s This Must Be Heaven, also at the Soho Theatre.
As indolent, luxurious and charming as ever, Tothill’s new show is another advancement in his war on austerity, a clarion call to those who love to sink their teeth into life’s pleasures and regret it afterwards. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a comic with whom I agree so wholeheartedly, and I felt that again listening to his interpretation of old-fashioned gluttony in all its decadent pleasure vs the modernity and coldness of greed.
The show has changed quite a bit since its work-in-progress days, most notably in the introduction of a running narrative about a series of terrible gigs he did on a cruise ship. We’ve been hearing a lot of these stories on stage recently, and I just want to know who’s booking these gigs? As Tothill points out, if 90 per cent of your audience are turning off their hearing aids and walking out, that’s not a death, it’s a booking error. And it seems like someone is making a lot of booking errors. In any case, if you’re not over 85 and trapped at sea, go and see John Tothill asap.
Published: 13 Oct 2025