The most popular comedy shows in London

This review is from the 2026 Edinburgh Festival Fringe Paddy Young is annoyingly handsome and has one of the best gigs in British comedy, being the co-anchor of SNL UK’s Weekend Update.  So you’d think a stand-up show bemoaning that he’s a permanently single loser might not entirely convince. But no, he’s all good: Will Sir Be Laughing Alone? kicks off with a joke so kamikaze inappropriate that you have to think there’s a vague chance of it escaping isolation and screwing up his career. So probably best not share it here. Young’s surreal, somewhat poetic set paints him as an arch oddball whose singledom can be attributed to weirdness, moroseness and an inability to comprehend the rules of life in general. He obsesses over the first girl he kissed, reasoning she is the answer to his funk, tracking her down to Copenhagen and planning to fly out to see her; he dates a group of 30 men (called ‘the lads’) all at once, a logistical nightmare; he stews over his housemate’s greater romantic success and takes petty solace in the fact he has the better hair of the two. I would say most of this is very definitely made up, but Young’s stand-up has its own weird artificial gravity that kind of means that even if you don’t believe what he’s saying to, you know what he means: the man we see before us is a massive loser, or at least he is for the purposes of the show. And reality and tall tales are amusingly blurred – I don’t believe Young dated 30 men at once but I do believe he injured...

This review is from the 2026 Edinburgh Festival Fringe I really loved Frankie Thompson’s previous Fringe shows Catts and Body Show (the latter made in collaboration with Liv Ello). Both of them were out-there satirical collages of video and voice recordings in which Thompson came across like a clown-world Adam Curtis, with her performance revolving around her dramatically lip syncing to the piece while serving a series of comical, otherworldly looks.  I suppose they gave the impression that Thompson was a gifted but vulnerable Gen Z savant, who barely spoke at all using her own voice: performing, but also hiding behind the recorded audio visuals. While aspects of new show Horrible Things remain distinctly Frankie Thompson – she still lipsyncs to a load of esoteric recordings, she still seems very irritated by the Tories – she now has a voice of her own. Quite a loud one too: clad in a polkadot gown, her persona is as a posh, slightly eccentric despot (think Queenie from Blackadder) who commands the room with a withering imperiousness, pulling faces of pure horror any time anyone threatens to interact with her.  She also vomits a lot. Nothing health and safety need to worry about, but with every dry heave another horrible thing is cued up. Some are nauseating: that recording of a freaky nine-year-old Jacob Reese Mogg you’ve probably heard before; a 1995 interview with the Tory whips office intimating that they’ve smoothed over instances of child rape; Cliff Richard. There...

Eccentric uncle of British comedy Bill Bailey returns with a new set of comedy songs and ramblings that are indeed – if the description is accurate anyway – rooted in his fascination with the Vaudeville era, the last great form of mass entertainment before the arrival of the screen.

This review is from the 2026 Edinburgh Festival Fringe If the advent of Saturday Night Live UK has offered an Edinburgh Fringe boost for the stars of the show performing here then it’s also offered a calling care to SNL UK’s legion of writers – many of them terrific stand-ups who presumably came close to being included in the performing line-up but there was simply no room for them. One suspects Bella Hull would have been a shoo in if the ‘acerbic female Gen Z stand-up’ slot wasn’t comprehensively filled already by the more famous Ania Magliano, but the volume of press and profiles that have greeted Hull’s latest set suggest she’s waiting in the wings if a vacancy comes up. Who cares if she’s a mean girl when the jokes are this funny? Her schtick on Mad Cow Disease is relentlessly ironic, relentlessly acidic and extremely funny. She wields withering disdain like a samurai with a sword and clearly lies as easily as she breathes, with an opening routine that ends with as spectacularly stone-cold piece of rug-pulling as I’ve ever seen in a comedy show. I’ve no doubt she mines her real life for inspiration: it is not unbelievable that she spent 2025 single; her whole extremely amusing reminiscence about having a chaotic upbringing being raised by her mum and grandma would surely be too random to have made up. But she applies a zingy, lightly poisonous filter to everything – a sequence where she is gratuitously horrible about her flatmate is funny precisely because it’s so...

Nominated for Best Newcomer at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Comedy Awards, Freddie Meredith’s Need a Light? is a by all accounts delightful hour of sketch comedy in which Meredith plays a nerdy, wannabe hip loser who spends 60 endearing minutes trying to start conversations with randoms in the smoking area of a club. The show was indeed so successful that Meredith was snapped up by SNL UK shortly after the Fringe, which has necessitated the rescheduling of his Soho run, which promptly sold out

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. After several West End stints the show returns as part of a season of work from producer Francesca Moody at The Other Palace.

The relative downgrade in the wellbeing of Western civilzation is liable to be bad for Nish Kumar’s mental health – the political comic gives the impression of taking every one of Trump’s depravities personally – but good for his audience: his mill is overflowing with grist. Expect darkly amusing dissection of the news, delivered by a man who gives every impression of being on the cusp of either a panic attack or combustuing from fury or possibly both. 

The Brit comedy superstar grapples with fame and fortune in his latest show, which kicks off in London in the autumn at the Apollo, heads across the country and throughout Europe, then call in at The O2 for a pre-Christmas victory lap.

One of the buzziest late night shows of this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Soul Sewage is Sam Eley’s debut hour as Basil Crumbwick – a horny, embittered old man with a papier maché head. Both uncomfortable and hilarious, it’s recreating some of that Fringe magic by being staged about as late as Soho Theatre goes, or at least it is for its initial October run. That’s now sold out, but Eley (and Basil) will be back for another crack at it in January 2027.

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.