Brighton Fringe comedy review

Once a regular on the comedy circuit, Andrew Pipe abruptly stopped in 2002 following a mix-up over a Jongleurs booking – a breaking point that surely had more to do with his state of mind than an admin error.

Returning to the stage a couple of years ago, he now offers what he admits is a cathartic show about some of the lows he hit due to his drug addiction.

The show runs on two parallel tracks. The first is a series of anecdotes from his time on the circuit, initially just about getting by as compere of his local club, the Wedgwood Rooms in Portsmouth, before learning his craft and making it to London — working at Screaming Blue Murder, going up to Edinburgh on a mixed bill that included Adam Bloom and Milton Jones and snorting cocaine in the toilets of the Banana Cabaret.

That overlaps with the second, darker, strand: a drug descent that moved from cigarettes and alcohol through cannabis, mushrooms and into cocaine, leading to his lowest ebbs. He found himself arrested over a minor incident, staged a dirty protest in custody, and ended up sleeping rough in a car park in Stirling.

This is told engagingly, for despite the Real Sociopath title – the first word pronounced, apparently, Rey-al, as in the Madrid football team – the grey-haired, sometimes bespectacled Pipe has an easy charm that belies the amoral, unempathetic diagnosis suggested.

Pipe is upfront about the fact this show is a way of getting his demons off his chest, but worries that it's not funny enough. That's true: his gags still seem rooted in the Nineties, to the point that they now seem a bit hack, and littered with references he knows are dated: Frank Skinner, Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway… He invokes Bruce Forsyth as the one cultural touchstone the younger crowd will still recognise – but it is still almost nine years since his death!

Another sign of changing times is that when he mentions his sobriety, he has to stop the audience from applauding so that his line about Brits never reacting positively to such news still works.

Pipe also has a long political segment that is pretty much just him despairing at the state of Donald Trump and Keir Starmer without much attempt to put a gag on the end, beyond wondering if Fifa’s decision to award Trump a sham peace prize can go to VAR – a quip he attributes to spotting elsewhere. 

Meanwhile, despite his frankness in calling up his personal nightmares, he’s cautious about plunging too intensely into them, wary that he’s supposed to be delivering a comedy show. That, too, is a cultural change as 2020s stand-ups will go much deeper and darker in baring their soul in search of laughs than they did in his heyday.

However, as a spoken-word piece, Real Sociopath does work to an extent. Not because it's well structured with storylines that conclude with satisfying neatness, because it’s not. But because Pipe is such a disarmingly engaging presence (and a decent impressionist to boot), honest to the point he's prepared to be, and palpably determined and happy to be turning his life around.

As an audience, you do feel this is a significant step in his closing the book on those awful decades, even if both the comedy and the excoriating autobiographical elements have much capacity to be developed. It’s a work in progress for a life in progress.

• Andrew Pipe: Real Sociopath is on again at the Black Dove, Brighton, at 6pm tonight

Review date: 30 May 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett