It is, says host Suzi Ruffell, the only gig where you get heckled by gulls. Or worse: the man next to me at the interval got spectacularly soiled by one. It’s also “colder than I expected it to be”, says headliner Phil Wang, who apologises for coming on stage “looking like your dad’s come to pick you up from a party”. The dad jacket was an unforeseen necessity: 10pm in an open space in Brighton starts to feel less park, more parky.
And yet, there’s something charming about the city’s annual Comedy Garden, an outdoor event big enough to resemble a summer festival, and small enough not to need large screens beaming the performance to the cheap seats. We’re still operating on a scale where John Kearns, for example, can tailor his whole 20-minute set around its opening, malfunctioning interaction with someone in the front few rows. Miffed at the ambivalence with which he’s greeted, Kearns undertakes an impromptu survey of what starts to feel like every member of the audience. “Have you ever seen me before?” Over and again. “Would you call yourself a fan?”
It’s a fantastic piece of improvisation, flirting with failure, enjoying the sensation of a gig on a knife-edge – but trusting himself, rightly, to turn the set around. When your material is as good as the routines Kearns cannibalises here from his touring show The Vanishing Days, these are risks you can afford to take.
That’s not the only treat on offer at a gig that features Wang in fine form, getting into a disagreement with the Brighton crowd over whether this year’s Pride has happened yet (“is that the straightest thing I’ve ever said?”), and Ruffell herself, delivering peppy no-frills standup on queer parenting and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. A supporting set from Sophie Duker is thinner on laughs. Not unlike another recent visitor to Brighton, Jack Whitehall, Duker is prodigious in the expressive skills of standup comedy, but tonight there’s minimal wit to back them up. There’s lots of “straight people do this” and “white people do that”, Duker telling us how sexy she is, and the crowd being asked to chant the word “black” to sparse comic effect.
Then there’s Rose Matafeo, workshopping corny gags on cue cards in advance of a work-in-progress Edinburgh fringe run. Matafeo has bumbling charm to burn, and what her unfinished jokes lack in finesse, they gain in self-mocking commentary on their inadequacies. Between the one-liners, meanwhile, there’s the kind of dating-and-dumping comedy we might expect from the creator of Starstruck, with compelling, and compellingly personal, reflections on love and heartbreak not just post-Covid, but as Matafeo moves into her 30s and finds her personality – horror of horrors! – locked in for ever.
It’s a lovely in-development set that brings to bear the maturing perspective of early middle-age on affairs of the heart that can feel as callow as ever. Worth weathering the cold for, then – if not (as my neighbour might confirm) the worst that the gulls can throw at us.
• This article was amended on 9 July 2023 to correct a misspelling of Suzi Ruffell’s first name.
• At Preston Park, Brighton, until 9 July.
