The most popular comedy shows in London

Though Ricky Gervais is an infinitely more polarising figure than he was 10 or 20 years ago, his popularity remains undeniable, with a lengthy run of London dates split between the Palladium and Wembley Arena lined up. Honed by a tour that’s already run for over a year, new show Mortality promises to look at the absurdities of life and death.

Nigerian standup Bamgboye took the best newcomer award at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe with Swings and Roundabouts her debut show which charted her move to the UK in her twenties, and showcased her often disorientating mastery of accents. Critics praised her confidence, poise and original, outsider-ish eye on British culture.

This review is from the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Joe Kent-Waters’s second show is exactly what I wanted it to be, which is to say that it’s basically a bigger budget remake of his first show.  In case you missed it, Kent-Waters made a huge impression at last year’s Fringe – winning the Best Newcomer award – with his creation Frankie Monroe, a hulking, gravelly-voiced, white-faced men’s club owner and self-declared ‘biggest bastard in Yorkshire’. The improbable longevity of his anachronistic Rotherham working men’s club was the result of a pact Frankie had signed with the Devil 25 years previously – and in debut show Joe-Kent Waters is Frankie Monroe: LIVE!!! the Devil came to collect, the show culminating in him being dragged to Hell, ‘by the balls’. Joe Kent-Waters is Frankie Monroe: DEAD!!! (Good Fun Time) is the direct sequel: it begins in Hell, where Frankie is essentially practising almost exactly the same schtick to the souls of the damned as he was to the men of Rotherham (who I’m sure are two very different groups of people). The jokes are different, but it’s the same character doing the same shtick in a similar way – an audience member is picked on to a remarkable extent; a puppet dog is deployed. And it’s brilliant, the best show I’ve seen at the Fringe this year. Sometimes it’s death to return to what you did last time out, but it was exactly the right decision for Kent-Waters. Most crucially, the joke is still funny. Frankie – a sort of monstrous amalgam...

There’s something genuinely heartening about the fact that Tim Key – essentially a weird poet – has become such a big deal, in part (of course) thanks to his appearances in less poetic guise in everything from talk shows to Alan Partridge to Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17. There’s no clear explanation as to what his new show Loganberry is about, and it seems like a stretch to imagine it’s signifcantly related to his excellent previous show Mulberry (which has nothing to do with mulberries). But really just enjoy the ride as the shambolic master settles in at Wilton’s for a couple of weeks.

Wide-eyed Indian stand-up Urooj Ashfaq made a big impression at the 2023 Edinburgh Festival Fringe with her deft, warm Oh No!, an account of her experience with therapy that led to her winning that year’s best newcomer comedy award. Now she’s back and already riffing on her squeaky clean image with How to be a Baddie in which she claims to have undergone a complete personality overhaul, returing as a ‘bona fide bad girl and edgelord who at times mentions sexy things and topics’.

Slapstick comedy sensation Starr attempts to perform every single Penguin Classic novel – from Frankenstein to The Grapes of Wrath – over the course of one joyously bonkers 70-minute show. Do not expect to learn that much about English literature.

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

US actor John C Reilly is a man of many parts, probably best known as a supporting actor in a slew of great films around the turn of the century including Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Gangs of New York, The Thin Red Line, The Hours and The Aviator. Anyway: he also does a vaudevillian comedy show which has won praise in the US and now makes its UK debut via two shows at Soho Theatre.