Liverpool Comedy Festival: Three to see

There's a cornucopia of talent on offer at Liverpool Comedy Festival this year, which makes it hard to guess what you might like, sat there with your individual sense of humour as you are. It’s probably worth your while to actually visit LCF's website, if you’re so difficult to please. But cool your heels awhile before you do that, and read about three acts chosen arbitrarily from the veritable banquet of standup available.

All three picks are held in the diminutive 81 Renshaw Street, an inauspicious place that might not look as though it’s home to some of the best shows of the festival. It’s an intimate venue – one that can feel packed solid with two dozen people, and heaving with three – which often makes for greater rapport with the audience. As the old saying goes, nine giddy idiots in a bunk bed almost always have more fun than two shy nuns in a canyon. Festival organiser Sam Avery is responsible for booking the lineup at 81 Renshaw, and it echoes his wider vision. “It's important to reflect the entire spectrum of comedic performers out there,” he says. “The big names are fantastic, but spending 60 minutes in the close company of acts who aren’t on television for whatever reason is a pretty exciting prospect.” Avery’s enthusiastic about the home-grown comics in this year’s lineup – “we have probably the most exciting crop of local talent we've seen in about a decade, and want to provide them with a space to flourish” – and he’s taken great pains to blend the natives with those from much further afield.

Three to see at Liverpool Comedy Festival:

Kate Smurthwaite
Do you watch Question Time? You’ll probably like hearing people make jokes about that sort of thing, then. One such person is Kate Smurthwaite (who, if nominative determinism applied, should be managing a tiny brewery). Smurthwaite has played in Liverpool twice before, she recollects: “When the Labour Party conference was in town and I was part of a show organised by political types, and once as part of the women's Reclaim the Night after-party… this will be the first time I've done a show open to anyone who wants to come. I'm looking forward to that.” Smurthwaite is one of the most politically minded acts on the circuit, with all sorts of accomplishments already under her belt, as well as her own style: “the sort of comedy that makes you think as well as laugh – if people like that sort of thing, they'll have a great time.” She’s also rather kindly spent a month at the Edinburgh Fringe practising this year’s show, The Wrong Sort of Feminist, to get it ready for her all-important Liverpool date. “By the end I'm itching to tour it. I’ve got various dates scheduled around the country and it's great to be adding Liverpool to the tour list for the first time.” If you desire to laugh solely at “choice and freedom, the feminist movement, the treatment of asylum seekers in Britain, Couples Come Dine with Me and edible pants,” then this is potentially the only gig for you. But that’s what you get for being so oddly specific in what you’re prepared to laugh at.

Rob Thomas
Should you desire your comedy bellowed at you in an angry fashion, then local lad Rob Thomas is happy to oblige in Working Class Zero (Hour Contract). Thomas is one of the proudest Scousers you could ever meet, and probably spends a great deal of his day job as a cabbie loudly professing that fact to cowering tourists. This is his first ever solo show, so he says it means a lot to him to be doing it in his home town, not least for the opportunity to yell his comedy at some familiar faces. “When you're a Scouser [playing] in Liverpool, you get the sense that you're all a part of something. Even if that something is just our own sense of being boss. The crowd are almost always willing someone local to do well. Also, no one wants to look like a divvy in front of their mum, so hopefully that will push me to work harder. Though it never did in school.” His first hour-long show is typically autobiographical, and a large part of it features how (as a bright working-class kid) he was thrust into a posh school at 11, but never felt as though he belonged in either world: “The show’s really about the effect that’s had on me. I’ve developed a bit of a working-class chip on my shoulder, but given the opportunities I had, I feel a bit false for having it.“ Possessing what one might kindly describe as an insistent tone, Thomas’s style is that of a man with an angry, boiling rage always lurking just underneath his not-at-all-calm demeanour. He can also be found belligerently screaming for half of a double header with the wonderful and equally local Kate Tracey, in We Used to Be Fit!

Liam Pickford
If you like your comedy more prone to bouts of capriciousness, there’s only one real choice: Liam Pickford, with Seaside Cock Novelties. “I wanted to call it An Exercise in Utter Futility, but was advised that this would put off people called Darren and Marie. So I picked three words I rendered mildly amusing then put them together. My set is like that. Like Twat Meccano.” With the frame of a man built to carry hods (but a severe disinclination to do so), he has a delightful ability to pluck words from the ether. He can appear baleful while wallowing in the failings of mankind, then the room is suddenly filled with florid absurdity. Running the gamut between ramshackle and brilliant, he’s truly unpredictable. “I've got a bit better at maintaining a veneer of competence. Then it cracks like eggs and I cry. My target is five walkouts: probably two couples, nullified by familiarity and their one pal who's a 'character.' They have no use for my teachings. It'd be like furnishing rabbits with calculators. Tragic and useless.” This is the first time that Pickford, who was just named runner up at this year's Chortle Student Comedy Awards, has brought a show to the festival, and he has a great fondness for the city in his own unique way: “It was the first city where I ran at a heckler with a bin. You can't buy memories like that. And why should you?” It's fondness that he is sure will be reciprocated: “I expect to be carried aloft along Bold Street on the anaemic shoulders of my army of the damned. That or the usual seven hipsters who turn up and go, ‘You've gotta see him. He doesn't mean it!’ But I do mean it. I really mean it.”

A similar breadth of styles can be found at every venue, as all the clubs in the city have worked tirelessly to present fantastic bills during the festival. Whatever your favourite flavour, there’s something for everyone’s taste at the buffet table. There’s probably even a gluten-free option. And with prices for the pockets of pauper or prince, there’s little excuse not to feast on the… ‘really big selection of food’ before you.

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Liverpool Comedy Festival takes place 17 Sep-4 Oct across various venues. See thecomedytrust.com/comedy-festival for full lineup info