Review of the Sussex festival

Although comedy is a major part of the Latitude offering, its comedy arena is – in common with most outdoor festivals – not the most forgiving environment. A distant stage in a massive tent denies stand-up its crucial intimacy, laughs are lost out of the open sides and much of the audience is there to chill out and let the material wash gently over them rather than engage keenly.

It means the more relaxed storytelling comedians, rightly or wrongly, tend to get muted reactions even if they command the attention – although as Friday night headliner Ross Noble proved, the right act can still energise the marquee.

But at lunchtime, Edinburgh Comedy Award winner Sam Nicoresti didn’t get the laughs her strong, often punny, writing deserved, even if the crowd did seem to find the more anecdotal parts of her set engrossing.

Ostensibly her material revolves around her experiences as a trans woman, though it’s more simply about an awkward person struggling through an unforgiving world. She’s not particularly strident about things such as pronouns, but does worry she’s not good enough at being a woman, the only consolation being that she was terrible as a man.

Similarly, her headline story about taking her chosen skirt suit into a changing room that may or may not have belonged to comedy arena sponsor TK Maxx gets laughs from exposing meaningless corporate rainbow-washing surrounding Pride and mocking the confidence of the ignorant - but mostly from reliving Nicoresti’s acute embarrassment.

More overtly political is Josie Long, both proud of the fact and aware of how annoying that can be, describing herself as ‘left-wing – but not in a fun way’. She teases the phoney middle-class lefties of Latitude for their hypocrisy, but you suspect a real gripe behind her jolly demeanour. 

It’s a trait of socialist politics that no one can quite be pure enough in their commitment to the cause, and even Long isn’t exempt. When Long unexpectedly found herself face-to-face with a particular villain, she came up short.

This is a great story, and although Long does a couple of gags ‘just to show you’re in the hands of a pro’ – her set is more about sharing the surprising yarn than banging out punchlines. She does, however, get more applause breaks than most comics as that soft-left audience express their agreement with her statements about corrosive car culture, evil profit-led housing and the atrocities in Palestine. 

Whether such support means anyone in the audience will actually heed her calls for active protest remains to be seen. Probably not, though, reinforcing her very point.

I’d have loved to report on how Sara Pascoe went down later in the afternoon, but dot matrix signs erected on the outer perimeter flashed ‘full’, and security guards on each entrance turned punters away. I think that might be a first in Latitude’s 20-year history, indicating her popularity with festival-goers.

Later, Chloe Petts may not have got the laugh breaks she’s used to, given she commented on how she was racing through her material much faster than usual. Again, though, the tent seemed rapt by her material on her pet topics of football and gender confusion, given how she presents a very laddish persona. And the tale of being in a church band is highly entertaining.

Compering the tent, Thanyia Moore did not come out between every act, just announcing from offstage and thus avoiding the thankless task of having to speak as huge numbers of people walk in and out of the tent, ignoring her. 

But that did mean some comics had to contend with that issue themselves, when they should have been establishing rapport. That was certainly the case with Christopher MacArthur-Boyd who didn’t really connect with his opening material about David Attenborough. As it is, the bit wanders around the houses, and seemed particularly slight when fighting against the distractions – though an alternative reading could be that was a sacrificial section until he could command the tent’s attention.

He certainly hit his stride in the second part of his time, especially with a routine about how single diners are treated in restaurants that has a joke almost every other sentence, and a silly gag about his dinosaur tattoo. Such bits demonstrate CMB at his best.

Irish comic Kyla Cobbler also took some time to get into her groove. She, too, had David Attenborough material, while her complaints about the underrepresentation of women in comedy, while universally true, didn’t quite sound right at the end of a female-dominated afternoon here.

But there’s a disarming directness to her more personal tales of picking up younger men, and the unvarnished truth about her body, from ovulation to hairy nipples. 

That honesty brought extra impact to her tale of picking up a Colombian man after a car-crash gig in Luxembourg, with him turning up to their subsequent date in a white linen suit. That highlighted the differences between Latin lovers and their Irish counterparts, with Cobbler backing up the comedy of stereotypes with this credible personal evidence.

So we turn to Friday’s headliner: Adam, the British Sign Language interpreter.

OK, technically it was Ross Noble. But signing his surreal, improvised flights of fantasy was always going to be a tall order – and the Geordie raised the stakes further tonight.

Getting interpreters to sign rude words is standard – I daresay even hack – practice, but Noble raised it to new levels, while also adding his brand of quirkiness. Who would have known that signing the Chuckle Brothers would have been so amusing, had Noble’s peripatetic mind not alighted on that reference. 

He makes much of how chaotic his endless diversions are – sharing that he was once heckled by Ritalin, when the ADHD drug was thrown on stage – and exaggerating how frustrated he imagines we are getting with him.

Of course, the truth is nothing of the sort. His ad-libbed inventiveness is wonderful to follow through all its twists and turns, which, remarkably, alight upon proper punchlines and unexpectedly neat callbacks.

As with much of his material, it’s unclear where the improv ends and the prepared stuff starts. Not that it matters when they are as strong as the routine about the trolleys parents use to ferry their kids around festivals such as Latitude. You’ll never see them in the same way again. And how he came to be miming opera emerging from a vagina made perfect sense at the time.

This was Noble’s first Latitude appearance in 18 years – after the last one ended with a rap on the knuckles for him leading the entire audience on a conga out of the tent. No such show-stopper this time, but a dazzling set that should hopefully secure him another invitation without having to wait so long.

Review date: 25 Jul 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Latitude