The house of fun

THE first Laughter-House of 2010 began with the brilliantly funny Matt Reed from Sunderland.

While he focused largely on north-south jibes – or more specifically anti-Sunderland and anti-London cracks – he covered plenty of comedy ground.

It is unlikely that comedy-goers had considered the quandary of being thrown in jail for killing a bat, Stephen Hawking as a “stand-up” comic, or the benefits of comedy as a profession.

Reed points out that where nurses could get in trouble for assisting or not assisting someone in medical need, a comic does not face repercussions by walking past a funeral and not stepping in to cheer up the congregation.

Regular compere Danny Dawes was, as ever, on good form, making sure the night ran smoothly and picking on conspicuous newcomers near the front.

After the first beer break, Jan Jack (pictured) filled a short slot as Spam Ayres with a raunchy rhyme or two that showed off her playful way with words and left the audience squirming in their seats with the vividness of her poems.

Straight after Ms Ayres, London’s Joel Dommett took to the stage. I had seen the bushy-haired comic before – at a Laughter-House night at Basingstoke’s Tonic Bar last summer –when he had tickled the audience with his childish sense of humour.

But comedy is a fickle science, and unfortunately, this time around, the comedian-audience chemistry missed the mark.

Dommett is very good at constructing bizarre scenarios – like making toast for a trick-or-treater, cycling with twisted handle bars like Harry Potter on his broomstick, and strange bed-room antics with a deodorant can and a lighter. But while I was wiping tears from my cheeks, much of the Red Lion crowd was less amused.

Most of the audience were clearly there to catch headline act, veteran comic Bob Mills. After an ironic soapbox rail against fat people, the rotund comic delivered a fluid set, topics including the follies of holding the 2012 Olympics in London’s East End and the Second World War. He even sang a spot of James Blunt.

Although personally I found him funnier on his last visit, he seemed to go down very well with the first Laughter-House crowd of the new decade.