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Greenwich Comedy festival review – starry lineup relishes return of live banter

‘Comedy isn’t essential?” asks Rich Hall, incredulously. “This isn’t essential?” After the government announced financial aid only for workers in “viable” jobs, comedians – like all performing artists – are smarting at their exclusion. How can this not be viable, argued Hall, from an outdoor stage in the gardens of the National Maritime Museum. And from the crowd at the Greenwich Comedy festival – in their socially-distanced hundreds, despite Baltic temperatures and a global pandemic – came ardent cheers of support.

After months largely without live performance, the Saturday-night bill was a tonic for performers and audience. For the acts, because they’d been stuck online since spring and craved the sound of applause – “I cheekily took a few claps from the NHS clapping by the end,” joked Aisling Bea. And for audiences because this was a bumper lineup, reacquainting them not just with live comedy but with high-end standup eager to speak about our extraordinary times.

It needed to be compelling, mind you: this was a perishing night by the river, more Siberian winter than Indian summer. MC Kiri Pritchard-McLean had to warm us up, and she didn’t mess around, with a lowest-common-denominator intro featuring fart gags, a brusque way with her front-row stooges, and one too many jokes about the prissiness of middle-class audiences. Then came Hall, the grizzled, bleary American who gets more grizzled and bleary with age, addressing his wife’s bout of coronavirus (replete with a choice gag about her loss of taste) and Trump’s difficulties with spelling. One letter out of place matters, he insisted, citing “Black Olives Matter” as evidence.

He ended with his trademark improvised songs, bespoke serenades for front-row punters. At their best, they feel like a gift to the live audience – but scarcely more so than Bea’s set, which showed that TV success (she won a Bafta for Channel 4’s This Way Up) has not cooled her standup fire. She’s just so endearing on stage, all funny voices, exaggerated eye rolls, and stealth truth-bombs concealed behind the cartoon goofballery.

It began as a set tailored to the present moment, as she compared face-mask and condom etiquette, joked about rebranding as a rightwing comic, and co-opted lockdown-era hit Normal People into a routine about Irish things becoming surprisingly cool. The contrast is stark with her own memories of the place, where same-sex relationships were deemed too hot for schoolchildren to handle even as the Messiah’s butchered, semi-naked body hung from every classroom wall. Cue chimes from a nearby church belfry, a gift to Bea (“I’m being heckled by Jesus!”), who ends with another godless memory about making Dairylea Lunchables from surplus “bodies of Christ”.

Can top-of-the-bill Sara Pascoe top that? She gives it a good go, with a set that’s light years from the social commentary in which she once majored. She broaches her new life as a married woman, struggling to model sexy lingerie for her husband, fretting about babies as the biological clock ticks – but loving her new dog. The baby routine is a standout, honouring Pascoe’s dilemma (Has she waited too long? Would she rather stay free?) without stinting on the laughs, notably via a droll detour into brain worms, those trivial thoughts that get stuck in your head and won’t dislodge.

She leaves us with a few of our own after a gig proving that live comedy isn’t just viable, but absolutely necessary.