Comedy club

Fall over laughing

The first comedian up was Matt Price, who was a bit like a curate’s egg: good in parts.

His first gimmick was to get to the whole audience to sway, while making us form a flame shape with our arms, and say, ‘Eww, don’t get too close’. This was, apparently, a ‘camp fire’.

As a West Country native, his mocking of his own people was funny, as well as his admission that, ‘I was born and bred in Cornwall…born inbred’. The incident when he’d just bought some hummus and olives and was confronted with a boy with a knife, and his solution: to say ‘Shall we pool our resources and have a picnic?’, also had us all laughing.

However, some of his sexually explicit jokes weren’t handled well, and even some of the male members of the audience looked uncomfortable.

The central act, Noel Britain, didn’t rely only on sexual jokes, but rather focused on aspects of society as a whole. These aspects ranged from his claim that Bath is a ‘classy place’ because it sells ‘Kentucky- fried pheasant’, to his delight when he chucks condoms in old peoples’ trolleys, and their consequent reactions at the checkout.

Apparently Osama Bin Laden masks are popular at Halloween in America. Britain had us in raptures when he cited hypothetical reactions from parents who saw ‘Osama’ out trick or treating: ‘Expected him to be taller than that’ and ‘Didn’t expect him to be wearing Spiderman PJs either’.

He had a variety of props, one of which was a massive 5-pound note. He tried to use it in shops, with the desperate words, ‘Take it quickly, I’m shrinking’. One salesperson gave the hilarious response, ‘Have you got anything smaller?’ Overall, a quick-witted and skilful performer.

Tasha Prest-Smith