Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

‘Ever feel like you've been cc-ed into your own life?’

With such typically exquisite phrase-making, John Kearns sums up his situation, finding himself not where he wants to be and buffeted by the actions of others, yet seeing a ragged dignity in the tenacity with which he must battle on.

This was not life as he imagined it would be at 39. After the collapse of a 12-year relationship, he’s a proud father of a five-year-old, but family life is fractured and he finds himself having to deal with awful estate agents (is there any other kind?) to find disappointing accommodation. ‘How has it come to this?’ he quietly wails to himself, while acknowledging that it could be worse.

In comedy, things are going reasonably well – while offering an escape from reality that he would never have thought possible growing up in South London’s lower middle-classes –  but all is relative. The Taskmaster money’s gone and the phone isn’t ringing with offers for the likes of Last One Laughing. And when he goes on Live At The Apollo, he knows this is not the audience for his literate, quirky, thoughtful comedy. Against this landscape, he can be forgiven a few swipes punching up at more successful comedians, the audience delighting in his indiscretion, as he establishes himself as a plucky outsider.

Tilting At Windmills is based loosely around a walking tour of London sites linked to TS Eliot’s notoriously impenetrable poem The Waste Land. That, and visiting National Trust gardens, is how Kearns likes to spend his spare time. It is not hard to understand how he is drawn to a verse about disillusionment, despair and the emptiness of life, even if actually reading it is beyond him.

Clips of the highbrow poem, as read by Alec Guinness, contrast with the mundanities of the comedian’s existence, bringing a bathetic edge to the show. But while Eliot grappled only with the profound, Kearns can describe a packet of contraband prawn cocktail crisps and make it feel like art. 

As ever, there's beauty in his throwaway details. Someone being described as heavy as a ‘playground gate’ is a marvellous image, in a show that is full of them. Whenever he describes a character in the tragicomedy of his life, you can conjure exactly who he means. 

There’s a poignant, melancholic edge as Kearns comes across as a sensitive figure, trying to remain robust amid the misfortunes of life, which seems to comprise one existential crisis after another. There’s a fragility that suggests just one more misfortune could break him, though he is determined it won’t.

He is cursed with acute self-awareness, pondering the strange get-up of wig and false teeth he persists in wearing on stage, and commenting after one particular routine: ‘That’s niche, even for me.’

But the modest aspirations – and the travails of achieving them – that lie behind Kearns’s artistry are actually very relatable, and come with huge laughs in his vivid, honest descriptions of optimism despite it all.

Review date: 30 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Monkey Barrel Comedy Club