We need a new kind of comedy, says character comic President Obonjo, “a comedy where you wake up the next morning and ask, ‘what the fuck did I just see?!’” If he’s right, then where better to look for it than the Leicester comedy festival? The country’s second biggest comedy knees-up assembles a wide array of performing talent, many of them warming up for the country’s biggest such event in August, and many just having fun. Obonjo, a faux African dictator resident in Hertfordshire, is one such, but on any given evening you can select from scores of possibilities.
I caught a handful of shows on Friday night: in a bar’s basement, in a restaurant, in a cinema. Sounds like the Edinburgh fringe, right? Well, yes and no. There’s no sense in Leicester of a city given over to performance. Crowds, posters, street acts, buzz – these are conspicuous by their absence, and the shows I see are modestly attended. (As is often the case in Edinburgh too.) But I did emerge with a bracing sense of the quality, and healthy diversity, of the comedy scene. I saw three engaging shows, all marching to the beat of their own drum, not one remotely like the others – or much like anything you’ll have seen before.
