Review of Stephen K Amos at Greenwich Comedy Festival *** (From News Shopper)

Review of Stephen K Amos at Greenwich Comedy Festival ***

9:39am Thursday 15th September 2011 in Comedy By Robert Fisk

AS THEY settle down to an evening of Poirot and X-Factor repeats on the television on a Sunday evening I imagine all comedians are waiting for ‘that’ call.

It’s the one they hope they will get but can never be sure – the one that dispatches them to fill up the line-up at comedy gigs across the capital like replacement secretaries being sent out from a job agency.

For Simon Brodkin that call sent him to the final night of the Greenwich comedy festival to play his character Lee Nelson, a happy-go-lucky south east London chav.

He was there to replace another character, that of Renton Skinner’s Angelos Epithemiou who had to pull out for personal reasons.

This was somewhat of a disappointment as Angelos was my main reason for going to the show.

But from his chats about his children – named in the style of Posh and Becks as Stairwell and Nee-Nar – to banter about different accents from around the world, Lee Nelson managed to come up with some bitingly funny comedy.

The audience lapped it up and seemingly had forgotten all about Angelos by the end of Lee Nelson’s performance.

One man who had always been on the bill was Steve Hughes.

Looking everything like an ageing heavy metal fan with his long pony tail and black t-shirt he was well placed for some hilarious observational material about Goths on dodgems.

Where he excelled though was in his more political material which, while not as overt as someone like Mark Thomas, still managed to bring a lot of humour to the hypocrisy in society.

As an Australian living in the UK he was perfectly placed to comment on the strangeness of some of the rules in this country.

For example, he mused, just why is it acceptable to drug up children with Ritalin to calm them down but it is not okay for adults to calm themselves down by taking marijuana?

Talking less about society as a whole and more about his personal experiences growing up in London with immigrant parents was headliner Stephen K Amos.

Veering from himself to impersonating his Nigerian mother, his act was very much about race and trying to find himself.

Most importantly though it was very funny.

Acting as the comedy glue for the evening was a heavily pregnant Lucy Porter.

Her compering jokes seemed a lot more sexual than when I have seen her before, including a marvellous play on words when she asked an audience member to start the applause for the first act.

It could have been as simple as that but, working in two very different ways, it became a matter of her asking a 16-year-old girl from Essex called Amber to spread the clap around the room – simply comedic genius.

All in all the fare on offer was a fitting end to the festival and whetted the audience’s appetite for another one next year.