Is it possible to have too much comedy? It's a question I asked myself at the Royal Albert Hall as stand-up after stand-up entertained a packed house at the annual Teenage Cancer Trust Comedy night. When they are this good though, keep them coming.
Watching so many great comics in the flesh was positively invigorating. Older comics had the chance to road test new material, younger comics had the opportunity to make a name for themselves.
Host Micky Flanagan swiftly got everybody in the mood for laughing reflecting on the aches of late middle age. He can't party hard any more, he admitted. After a recent night of hedonism he found himself in the toilet talking to the paper towel dispenser. Now 62 he lives in fear of succumbing to a hunch.
Nottingham's Scott Bennett is only in his forties but picked up the ageing theme and ran with it. He also used to be able to dance until dawn, now he is more interested in finding a chair with adequate lumber support. Bennett really should be more famous. He's a keen-eyed observational comic in the Jason Manford/John Bishop mould and stardom is surely just one punchline away.
Jack Skipper covered similar terrain, but from the perspective of being in his thirties. His biggest bugbear is looking after his small children when he is brutally hungover. Skipper was one of the babies on the bill, but the former Croydon carpet fitter is already a name on TikTok and clearly destined for mainstream fame.
The line-up was thin on diversity, but Zoe Lyons went some way towards redressing the balance even if her material was not a major departure. Lyons recently hit fifty and has discovered the delights of drawstring trousers. Her colonoscopy was not fun, but listening to her describe the indignity certainly was.
Josh Widdicombe's stand-out tale was his account of his number plate being cloned. The perma-anxious TV regular wondered if his car was being stolen while he slept then returned each morning. If that anecdote was unique his memories of PE teachers who walked everywhere in their shorts had the entire audience nodding in recognition.
After the interval and a moving account of the work done by the Teenage Cancer Trust, Finlay Christie was another breakout act. He recalled how when he was in Finland everyone thought he looked Finnish. One woman said he was the spitting image of her son and then produced a picture of "the ugliest kid I've ever seen."
There's an appealing precocious world-weariness to Christie. If Ricky Gervais had been a stand-up in his twenties he might have been something like this.
If the show was heavy on bloke jokes Katherine Ryan was a breath of glammed-up fresh air, giving feckless men in general and her "current husband" in particular a thorough verbal thrashing. Ryan recently had surgery to remove a cancerous mole, but was as scalpel sharp as ever.
And finally Romesh Ranganathan, who has just returned from filming in India and came back with a stomach upset and a droopy moustache that makes him resemble a "retired squash player".
His peerless set homed in on the travails of living with teenage sons. He also revealed that he has been getting into manicures. On a night with plenty of highlights he certainly nailed it.
