Brighton Fringe comedy review

A Street Mattress Named Desire is about the two worst years of Jordan  Jones’s life: 2014 and 2024

However, don’t expect anything too deeply exposing. The 34-year-old is very much in comedy newbie mode, offering up a fact about his life and following with a slightly glib, flippant joke, before moving on to the next.

The punchlines are amusing enough – and as proper jokes would certainly stand out in an open-mic night – but for a full (well, 45-minute) show feel relatively shallow, even though he’s personable, chatty and engaging as a comic.

In 2014, he was 22, doing dead-end jobs and still living at home in a dull provincial town – Tonbridge in Kent in his case – and lacking direction in life. A condition that experts call ‘being 22’. 

The peculiarly shady council estate where he grew up, cheek-by-jowl with machete-wielding criminals, adds some colour, but with that superficiality of setting up quick gags rather than portraying complete world.

At this point point, he decided to do something to change his listless life and moved to Brighton – where he acquired the titular street mattress, much to the horror of a later girlfriend when she discovered what she was sleeping on.

2024 offers a substantially bigger challenge when Jones was diagnosed with testicular cancer, a journey that’s given many a comic a purposeful show. Again, however, while individual lines are funny, Jones is hamstrung by his cursory approach, clearly very wary of dumping any misery on the audience, even if he is in the clear now.

‘I haven’t got a good gauge on it yet,’ he says of the experience which, if it did cause him to contemplate mortality or masculinity, he isn’t ready to interrogate on stage yet.

Jones sets himself up as the sort of guy who’s not edgy as he wants to be, joking that his tattoos are more barista than tough guy, that his first name means ‘river of judgment’ but he feels more like a ‘canal of indifference’, and that even his sideline playing in metal bands doesn’t make him hardcore – as proved by the songs he delivers here.

It’s all amusing enough, and he’s a likeable, easy presence, but really needs to dig deeper to be distinctive. 

Review date: 21 May 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Brighton Presuming Ed