The most popular comedy shows in London

You’ll have a job getting into any of James Acaster’s bewildering multitude of London solo shows this March, although if you’re a fan of the subversive comedy superstar – and who isn’t – then by all means sign up for a waiting list, and it looks like his Hackney Empire shows (technically in April) aren’t entirely sold out at time of writing. These dates are, apparently, a basically finished new show, just it doesn’t have a name, with the only description the delightfully flip ‘a brand new show, full of everything you love about James Acaster and more!’. But you can also catch him at the head of a frankly sensational bill at a charity gig for The Bike Project earlier in the month at the Union Chapel. At time of writing it’s not sold out and as well as Acaster you get Sophie Duker, Janine Harouni, Catherine Bohart, Olga Koch and Jack Barry on the bill.

Thanks to the ongoing cult behemoth that is Taskmaster, its host Greg Davies finds his stand up career hitting new highs, with a month of shows at the Apollo for his new show Full Fat Legend to be followed in December with his debut at the O2 – his biggest show to date. Despite the immodest name, the new show is, in essence, an autobiographical exploration of what an idiot he is. 

Fancy yourself a bit of a comedian? Ever wanted to go on a game show? Now is your chance. The Audience Vs is a brand-new live comedy gaming show, where audience members go head to head with real-life celebs. Hosted by Glenn Moore, created by journalist Simon Parkin and produced by Taskmaster honchos Avalon, the game will see punters battle comedians in retro video games, including Mario Kart, Street Fighter and Grand Theft Auto. Previous guests include Phil Wang, Sarah Keyworth, Ellie Gibson, and Sooz Kempner, with upcoming guests including Frankie Ward, Iain Stirling, Jamali Maddix and John Robertson. 

The longest London run to date for Sam Morrison’s stand-up show about the death of his partner – you’d call that a somewhat paradoxical notion, but this is a fertile era for comedy out of misery (call it the Baby Reindeer Effect). Tracing his relationship with Jonathan from beginning to end, it’s not so much an attempt to rationalise his death as a poignant (and hilarious) attempt to respond to it somehow.

This review is from the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. In this sweet debut Fringe hour,  Lewisham-born-and-bred stand up Toussaint Douglass threatens us with 55 minutes of jokes about pigeons.  As a stickler for high-concept shows, I was a little disappointed to discover this was a colossal overstatement: there’s maybe 15 minutes on the ubiquitous winged rats. But they’re 15 good minutes, not least the show’s brilliantly chaotic cold open where Douglass makes one audience member drive a stuffed pigeon strapped to a remote control car around the room while others are made to try and feed it bread. For the most part Accessible Pigeon Material is a show about Douglass and his family, though he has a pleasingly idiosyncratic way of approaching what might otherwise be fairly humdrum material. There’s some great gags about Lewisham and some charming stuff about living with his ‘87-year-old flatmate’ (ie his nan, for whom pigeons were emblematic of the UK when she arrived with the Windrush generation). Best of all is a sequence where he roleplays his geezerish father while an audience member is forced to play the part of a younger Douglass trying to get his pathologically undemonstrative old man to say ‘I love you’. That this last gag isn’t pursued with quite the self lacerating viciousness it could be is indicative of the fact that Douglass basically seems like a really nice guy, making a show about the things that interest him (which includes pigeons). Perhaps he’d benefit...

15 acts compete in this heat of the 2013 Laughing Horse New Act of the Year competition, plus MC Lewis Bryan.