Review of some dark stand-up from Jimmy Kimmel writer

Laurie Kilmartin’s on a mission to reclaim dark comedy from the edgelords. Her sense of humour can be as bleak as it comes, but her astringent barbs come from a place of grim honesty, rather than lazy forbidden-fruit jibes. Yes, she’s shoving the envelope into areas that are morally indefensible, but there’s a logic to how she gets to her punchlines, however warped.

Her show at Soho Theatre offers some explanation to how she became so hardened, from a difficult relationship with her emotionally frigid mother to being an ignored outsider in high school – all the classic comedian origin stories. She reveals, too, that she was molested by a paedophile coach while a junior swimmer in California, a fact which gives her permission to crack some highly inappropriate jokes.   

Kilmartin is now a writer for Jimmy Kimmel – or rather ‘talentless, not funny, ex comedian’ Jimmy Kimmel to use presidential language –  and she starts her set with some topical-ish gags about Charlie Kirk’s widow Erika and Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing health insurance executive Brian Thompson, that might normally be expected to stay in the writers’ room, too brutal for broadcast. It’s refreshing for someone on the left of politics to be so unashamedly mean – strictly entre nous in the context of a comedy gig, of course.

The American comic is bluntly unsentimental about being a single mum to a now 19-year-old boy and the travails of dating at the age of 61, and the damaged men she encounters. She’s deeply cynical about it all, with, you suspect, good reason.

But for all this – and her self-confessed ‘vengeance-based personality’ – her wickedness is wrapped up in an amiable matter-of-fact delivery. She doesn’t play up the darkness, but lets it sneak up on you in everyday conversation, making it all the more impactful. 

She has also mastered less tangible skills of stand-up, rolling with the muted reactions of a Monday night crowd, making light of the room’s low energy without shaming the room for it, nor letting it put her off her stride too much. 

The Non-Refundable Plane Tickets Tour is an American hour of barely connected bits, rather than a British one with a sense of greater purpose. Some of the segments therefore don’t seem to earn their place if they don’t land with the force of her finest material. 

What little cohesion there is also takes a hit from her recalibrating for both transatlantic references and the room’s reticent energy – even if she refuses to compromise too much to compensate. Her graphic description of how women might seize power from the patriarchy by disgusting them attests to that.

Recognising that she doesn’t function like the rest of normal society, Kilmartin says of her closing anecdote: ‘The more I tell this story the more I realise I have work to do on myself.’ For her comedy’s sake, let’s hope she doesn’t – as her damaged sensibilities prove perfect in this line of work.

• Laurie Kilmartin: The Non-Refundable Plane Tickets Tour is also on at Soho Theatre at 7.15pm tonight. 

Review date: 28 Jul 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Soho Theatre