Last year’s Best Newcomer winner Jonny Sweet is back with his new show, and as soon as you walk in the door you know you’re in for something a little bit different. The excitable twenty-something is frantically hugging, kissing and high-fiving practically every member of the audience, clambering over chairs and people and setting the energy level for today’s lecture – the history of the Type 42 Destroyer, HMS Nottingham.
An unlikely topic to fill an hour of comedy with, you might think, but Sweet’s slightly disturbing and shambolic lecturer persona guides us through a far-from-academic and at times absurd presentation, with more than enough calamities and digressions to keep the audience entertained. His character allows him to get away with some fairly politically incorrect views and harass members of the audience, whilst his vocabulary is refreshingly contradictory, mixing Old Boy expressions with crass, modern abbreviations, emanating from a squealing, nervously jerking body.
Sweet’s PowerPoint skills serve to create a double act, and where Sweet might not be able to pull off the powerful punch-line the audience is craving, he leaves it to a witty picture snatched from the internet, or a piece of absurd text, timed to perfection.
The “technical mishaps” sometimes lead to awkwardly fragmented sections of supposed improvisation where the potential for virtuosity could have been grasped (at one point Sweet resorts to having the audience time him running across the room). However, putting this aside, this promising comedian puts all of his energy into his set, and delivers a fast-paced, original performance. A must-see.
4/5 
Yann Chalmers
(2 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)
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