Review by Steve Bennett

Latitude remains the best outdoor festival for big-name live comedy, mitigating the effects of a daytime gig in a vast open-sided marquee with inevitable noise bleed with a line-up that’s just as appealing as its musical offerings.

Friday, for instance, was headlined by Greg Davies, giving an abbreviated version of his ongoing tour show that on its own would cost you nearly £60 to see elsewhere. 

We reviewed that show at Wembley Arena here, and his rammed-to-the-gills Latitude performance  proved just as brilliant, with humiliating stories that slowly reveal increasing levels of ineptitude and physical failings to ensure he’s far from the Full-Fat Legend his show is self-mockingly titled. 

Earlier, Joel Dommett had taken to the stage. These days he’s known more for hosting the likes of The Masked Singer as he is for being a stand-up, so it’s right enough his material reflects that.

Telly fans will get material about him working with Aha’s Morten Harket,  ex-minister Alan Johnson, Shirley Ballas and Arlene Phillips – and THAT Macy Gray storm-out. That’s the one story where he doesn’t portray himself as the slightly hapless everyman catapulted into the strange world of shiny-floor ITV showbusiness, even if he does seem so at home on screen.

How he got here from the awkward teenager recording sub-par raps and writing in his diary about how maybe, one day, he’d like to be a comedian is the narrative backbone to the set – and presumably his tour this autumn – and gives the story a touching moment of ‘aw’ at the end. 

However the balance here is more towards being besties with Davina McCall and doing corporate awards bashes – which he professes to love.

The set’s as personable as you might expect, though autotuning the hate tweets he gets is something of a duff note (and requires momentum-sapping faffing with his phone) that suggests his musical gifts haven’t progressed much since the teen years. Also Twitter clapbacks might be part and parcel of a comedian’s life, but these modern ‘so I had the last laugh’ moments are rarely the best moments of comics’ sets.

Paul Sinha also included a hefty chunk of these in his performance, though perhaps more justified in a set more widely hallmarked  by a prickly defiance that he wasn’t going to let his Parkinson’s – let alone his haters – define him.

On Saturday, Harriet Kemsley related stories of divorce, dating and parenting and how she’s not great at any of them, in her usual gushy, oversharing way. She portrays herself as a ‘bit of a mess’ at life – and neither is her stand-up the slickest, most gag-driven you’ll see. 

But her seemingly unfiltered honesty and upbeat, gabbling energy is a winner  – ‘We’re having a fun time!’ is something of a catchphrase – and it’s easy to get caught up in the maelstrom of her life and her performance.

She did have to cope with a self-identifying ‘mushroom wizard’ standing right at the front barrier, amid a sea of people on the ground. An odd distraction, but the friendly, if bemused banter, showed Kemsley at her best. 

In contrast to her looseness, long-time Latitude stalwart Marcus Brigstocke is all about the tight jokes, delivered in a relentlessly effective set.

Middle-class folk who go to the artsier end of music festivals are certainly his people, a fact underlined with jokes about Basement Jaxx and Sting’s sets the previous night and the hippy offerings in what he dubbed the ‘waft field’.

Of course there were political jokes at the expense of the ‘rabid satsuma’ in the White House, the rage contrasting with his cosy, tie and cardigan get-up, far from most festival-goers’ get-up. Quips about how terrible men are – and the least we can do not to be so awful – also went down well, understandably.

That said he controversially admitted to a soft spot for Greg Wallace, having appeared with him on Celebrity Masterchef, though it wasn’t the most flattering endorsement. 

Mark Watson’s another veteran of many a Latitude comedy stage – or as he wittily called it ‘the best place in the country to swear at kids’. As usual, his barely controlled chaos lands well, engineering the low-status position that he’s being upstaged by the BSL interpreter, a more inventive approach than just getting them to sign rude words, as many comics do.

He performs off-stage, right at the front of the audience, almost on the spot where Mushroom Wizard once was. ‘The closer I get, the more unhinged I’m becoming,’ he says with intense fervour.

However Watson nurtures a very safe space to play with this manic energy. He’s always the victim of his fizzing brain, getting into bizarre conversations at the meat industry awards that a corporate pro like Dommett would never countenance.  Yet behind all the manic energy there’s cleverness and structure at play – as one brilliant callback devastatingly shows.

Kerry Godliman was another hard-hitter, bluntly expressing her frustrations at middle-class life and the unreasonable expectations families and society impose on her, again taken from her current tour. She performs with a pop-eyed rage at all the shit she has to deal with, and it’s hugely appreciated by – and cathartic for – huge swathes of her audience.  

A smaller crowd greeted the two Americans who rounded out Friday, despite their fame back home.

Professional Trump-antagoniser Michelle Wolf started by taunting the president, an approach which brought her such notoriety at the 2018 White House Correspondents Dinner. Here she wondered why all the gym and crypto bros saw the Donald as an alpha given how out of shape – both physically and mentally – he is.

But this was not the main thrust of Wolf’s set. Noticeably pregnant with her second child, she spoke about the difficulty birth of her first child and consuming the placenta. 

There was perhaps a bit more honesty (and occasional playing with the line of ickiness) than jokes, but she’s always interesting. The story about ‘accidentally’ buying a children’s book featuring gay parents from her store in Barcelona, where she now lives, in contrast to how the title would be treated back in the US speaks volumes about how the cultures have diverged.

More comedy-forward were her routines about conjoined twins and not knowing if her baby was racist, teasingly playing with sensibilities. 

That Reggie Watts is more about vibes than jokes is well established. And if you didn’t know that, the weird stream of consciousness with which he opened, delivered in a privileged English accent that gradually became more satanic, set out his stall.

He has zero sincerity, even on subjects such as racism, and the more pretentious his delivery, the more surreal and trivial the imagery he projects, whether musing about Portaloos or Phil Collins.

Likewise his loop-pedal music, based on his immense vocal range, sounds great, but is utterly meaningless, hypnotic rhythms ebbing and flowing. At one point the electronics cut out, leaving Watts making ridiculous noises and effecting mic cutouts, like a modern-day black American Norman Collier. And while he’s obviously a musical comic, he’s also a great physical one too, as his idiosyncratic dance moves prove.

In some ways such an alternative act is an odd choice of headliner, just as he was an odd choice to be James Corden’s bandleader on late-night TV, but it kinda works, even if the secret, late-night, in-the-woods set he also performed seems like more of his natural home.  

Sunday opened with a Comedy Store take-over, benefitting from a cloudburst that sent festival-goers scurrying for the protection of the tent. They were treated to Kiri Pritchard-McLean’s vividly inappropriate story of a paediatric first-aid course, led by a ‘creepy chops’ and in which the child-sized dummies were treated with gleefully inappropriate disrespect.  

Following Godliman’s barnstorming set on Saturday, the menopausal baton was picked up by Jen Brister and headliner Bridget Christie.

Brister, winning over the audience simply by walking on in an ‘Elon Musk is a bellend’ T-shirt insisted her set was ‘purely for middle-aged women’, with a litany of things she finds newly insufferable.

She resents menopause as a reminder of the march of time, for taking away her ability to drink in quantity – a big deal for Gen Xs –  and for, apparently, making her eyes smaller. That  observation didn’t seem to be born out by the evidence in front of us, but she made it sound weirdly believable and funny and that’s enough.

That menopause is chipping away at her tolerance gives her stand-up extra grit, and while she tells of how it robs her of the ability to find the right word at the right time, she always hits the mot juste in her stand-up, such as referring to all her kids’ toys, accurately, as ‘landfill’. There’s a strong physicality in her act-outs, too.

For fellow Gen Xs, hearing Daniel Foxx doing  Peter Kay-style nostalgia comedy along the lines of: ‘Remember Wii Fit’ might come as a shock reminder of the march of time.

His was a bit of an inconsistent set, but he does well when adopting a superior attitude. ‘My father will hear of this,’ is an excellently haughty retort.

Talking about ‘gay; being a schoolyard insult in the 1990s gave into his account of a very nasty homophobic assault. But I *think* he got the Last Laugh by making it very weird in his comedy. 

A routine about casting school nativities is probably too long, but ends in a gloriously outlandish story about what his headmistress did. Meanwhile, claiming Disney characters as gay and mocking bouji East London hipsters was a little more forumulaic.

That’s not a charge you could ever level at Jin Hao Li, with every aspect of language, tone and cadence up for grabs in a quirky set that weaponises his low-status shyness both in the moment and in the telling of stories such as his unlikely stint as a conscript into the Singapore Army. He’s odd and distinctive – and a big hit with the Latitude crowd. 

Finally for the weekend, Bridget Christie, more than matching Brister and Godliman for righteous menopausal rage. She underpins it with biology: the oestrogen that made her so compliant has now dried up and she’s got zero tolerance for her children’s nonsense. Though it’s hard to imagine her ever being too much of a doormat.

Away from this topic she talks about being newly single after a long time, reluctant to date given a partner would be a long way down her list of priorities now she has a rich life, and recalling disastrous encounters from last time she was dating, 20 years ago. 

It’s all brought to life with an excellent physicality, as she morphs into a foul-tempered gremlin or acts out an odd sexual encounter. 

The extended story of her grasping for the right word is an object lesson in ad absurdism escalation, while her trying out a literal fanny magnet – an odd and useless bit of mumbo-jumbo in place of HRT – is equally odd.

And kudos to the comedy tent’s vision mixer who projected perfectly timed cutaways of women in the audience identifying hard with every scenario Christie described. She’s speaking for them.

Review date: 29 Jul 2025
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Latitude