Sitting in the front rows of a comedy club can be a dangerous experience and a triple bill of top comics in Bishop’s Stortford ensured some Saturday night squirming.
From compere Paddy Lennox to political firebrand Mark Thomas there was no hiding place for some of the audience at The Laughing Bishops Comedy Club’s intimate venue at Water Lane United Reformed Church Hall.
But it was a laugh a minute as host Lennox served up an eclectic bill of experienced mirth-makers.
The ebullient northern Irishman thrives on interaction with the crowd and no one is safe, from his “middle class” Bishop’s Stortford customers to Essex men and women from Harlow.
It’s generally gentle ribbing and you feel Paddy genuinely is interested to learn who is attending the monthly nights. An Austrian woman visiting her daughter in Stortford might have thought twice, though, about admitting she had a swimming pool in Ibiza as Lennox goaded her for not having taken recreational drugs at the Spanish party island.
First on the bill was Geordie comic Gavin Webster and his scatter gun approach kept the audience on their toes. Who knew that the Romans built their wall at aptly named Wallsend in Tyne and Wear because they realised Newcastle folk were too much to contemplate and heaven knows what was on the other side.
Webster pushed the boundaries and warned the audience “if you didn’t like that joke…..”.
But his humour seemed tame when it was the turn for Mark Thomas to take to the stage. It didn’t take him long to launch his missiles at the Tories and the routine comparing those in the party who are leaving their constituencies for greener grass with migrants taking to the boats to get to the UK was a perfect illustration of his comic craft.
The Tory bashing continued but Thomas showed he is not just a one-trick pony revealing his love for AFC Wimbledon football club and the chants he joins in with in such as “we’ve got the ball, we’ve got the ball...we had the ball!”
Thomas will be back at The Laughing Bishops on Sunday June 2 as he previews his Edinburgh Fringe show The Gaffa Tapes along with 2022 Edinburgh Comedy Award nominee Colin Hoult.
If Thomas attacked the audience machine-gun style final act Dave Fulton’s wry humour was a contrast, but just as funny.
The boundaries of taste were again tested by the American comic who it appears fled his home country more than 20 years ago to escape the rednecks and Trumpism. A night of laughter that sometimes led to open-mouth- gasping rounded off in style.