Rudi Lickwood is widely credited as one of the funniest black comedians in Britain and he is both funny and black, a point that he not so much discusses in detail but more hammers into you for an hour. For Rudi freely admits he talks about what he knows and what he knows is a lot about the history of black politics and inequality by skin colour.
A meaty subject matter that to be fair is a million miles away from the MP expenses scandal and moaning about the state of Edinburgh that is in hot discussion by most comedians around. For the most part Rudi gets the audience behind him coming across as warm, intelligent man who is fiercely proud of his background. He comes across as a genuinely likeable character telling stories about his involvement in helping prisoners rehabilitate, and performing for the troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. Clearly this has had a huge impact on his life and is something he wants to share with the audience but here lies the problem. You have to balance the light with the dark to bring out the laughs, focus too much on your theme and you do so at the cost of the comedy. Something Rudi is far too busy venting about all that is wrong with the world to notice that the laughs have all but dried up.
What starts of as a fun, light evening slowly descends into an unpleasant list of all things wrong with the world, made even more unbearable by observations that are as obvious as they are one sided.
2/5 
Martin Miller
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