Lou Sanders in Another Great Show Again review

Lou Sanders isn’t playing the Fringe to ‘be discovered’, get rich or secure a spot on ‘Mock the Week’. She’s here to flog calendars. ‘I've got to sell 16,000 of these to break even,’ she says, flaunting a crudely made flipchart, where each month depicts the comic with a piece of fruit or vegetable.

Sanders’s stand-up show, however, is less fruity more nuts. It’s a chaotic mish-mash of ideas: stories of ex-boyfriends, talking vagina puppets and bags of flour. But, somehow, she’s mashed them into a pleasing (and ludicrous) shape.

The lovable loon races through her ideas at a rapid pace, challenging the audience to keep up. She flips conventional stand-up rules with her blustery, teenage-like delivery: her sharpest jokes are treated as throwaway lines and any groan-worthy gags are bombastically overplayed. ‘You’re in safe hands,’ she says, in her faux-arrogant persona, ‘I’m funny all of the time.’

The London-based comic allows us a breather as she reclines in her chair to read some erotic short stories. Tons of comedians have spoofed brainless sex fiction since the ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ phenomenon, but Sanders nails it here (no pun intended). Her writings are filled (no pun etc) with glorious lines: ‘He liked his women like he liked his cars: imported from China… and upgraded every seven years.’

The show does take a while to hit its stride. Sanders’s frenzied style and overblown sense of self-importance are difficult to latch on to at first. But once you’ve had a few bites from her bowl of mixed nuts you’ll acquire a taste for her deliciously silly stand-up.

‘Lou Sanders in Another Great Show Again’ is at the Laughing Horse @ City Cafe, 10.30pm (not 10.30am, as it says in the print brochure’