Aaah Sure, It's the Irish Comedian of The Year!

• Claire Sawers
• 22 August 2017

This article is from 2017.

Leftfield musings lift an otherwise safe musical comedy set

Studenty bants flow freely in this solo comedy musical show from the friendly, bearded Irishman, Steve Bennett. He plays the small room hidden at the back of an Irish pub, armed with little more than his permagrin and a ukulele. Some of the boyfriend / girlfriend material, and safe stuff about stealing the duvet in bed at night, lets him down simply by being a bit too obvious. But he's funnier when he starts going a bit more leftfield and, for example, talks about feeding the elderly into a wood chipper.

Raised a Protestant, he reimagines a Catholic church ceremony as a banging club scene before scatter-gunning gags about abortions and parenthood, presenting some of his own handwritten porn poetry and finally finishing with a twisted lullaby for children scared of having bad dreams. If that sounds a bit all over the shop, it is, maybe because he tries to cover too much ground in an hour. Bennett also veers a couple of times into nonsense territory when he starts singing about gentrifying the apocalypse. Luckily he carries off the more chaotic or baffling bits with his easy-going style and handles audience interruptions with charm.

Laughing Horse @ Finnegan's Wake, until 27 Aug, 7.30pm, free.