The most popular comedy shows in London

Nominated for Best Newcomer at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Comedy Awards, Freddie Meredith’s Need a Light? is a by all accounts delightful hour of sketch comedy in which Meredith plays a nerdy, wannabe hip loser who spends 60 endearing minutes trying to start conversations with randoms in the smoking area of a club. The show was indeed so successful that Meredith was snapped up by SNL UK shortly after the Fringe, which has necessitated the rescheduling of his Soho run, which promptly sold out

This review is from the 2026 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Conceptual comic Joseph Morpurgo hasn’t been totally absent this last 10 years: he recently brought back his classic 2015 show Soothing Sounds for Baby. However, Highlander 70 is his first new work in nearly a decade although you’d hardly guess it if you didn’t know: he throws himself into a show with truly esoteric subject matter with the breezy energy of a man who pumps out a weirdy Fringe show a year. And although he’s not an observational stand-up type who was going to talk us through what he’s been up to, there’s just something admirably ballsy about announcing his return with this. Wearing clay-coloured face paint for whatever reason, he dives straight into the premise. He allegedly randomly happened across a 1970 high school yearbook for a US high school called Highlander Academy, in New Jersey. And from the pictures contained therein he spins an eccentric and amusing yarn about David Moon, a student who appears multiple times in the book. Of course Murpurgo has no real idea who Moon was. But he has crafted a narrative that Moon sits at the heart of, when a private diary detailing the straitlaced student’s love for the most popular girl in school goes missing on graduation day, prompting an epic quest to retrieve it.  I would assume that somehow Morpurgo did happen upon the real yearbook – it seems like too mad a thing to have entirely fabricated – but clearly the wild stories he tells of David and his...

Sir Lenny Henry has long since transcended being a ‘mere’ comedian – if he ever really was – with a career that has long leant more towards the stage, kids’ books and general elder statesman-ing. He’s still got it, though: aged 67 he heads out on his first stand-up tour in over a decade with Still at Large. His first since 2010, it’s billed as ‘part stand-up, part storytelling and part conversation’.

There’s something genuinely heartening about the fact that Tim Key – essentially a weird poet – has become such a big deal, in part (of course) thanks to his appearances in less poetic guise in everything from talk shows to Alan Partridge to Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17. He’s been touring new show Loganberry – follow up to previous hit Mulberry – for a couple of years now and it’s another good ’un, a midlife crisis show dispatched in Key’s inimitable style, prompted by his outrage when Gabby Logan invited him on her podcast about middle age.  

The Brit comedy superstar grapples with fame and fortune in his latest show, which kicks off in London in the autumn at the Apollo, heads across the country and throughout Europe, then call in at The O2 for a pre-Christmas victory lap.

This atmosphere-heavy, nostalgia-suffused second show from Singapore-raised comic Hao deliberately intercuts the mythic and the mundane – the arty stuff and the gags – as it details his longing for home as his moves to unfamiliar London. It’s certainlty quite a different style of comedy but it is funny as well as the more out there stuff, and it bagged Hao an unexpected but not unwelcome place of the Edinburgh Comedy Award shortlist this Fringe.

High concept comic weirdo Brookes last popped out of his lair a couple of years ago with Fontanelle, a show that – contrary to its name – was kind of (kind of) his attempt to do a musical about the Titanic. His latest show The Part of You That’s Always Screaming was ‘inspired by an absolutely shocking incident on a train’ and sees Brookes take a more contemplative, less conceptual – if still pretty odd – approach Expect it to be weird and funny.

One of the buzziest late night shows of this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Soul Sewage is Sam Eley’s debut hour as Basil Crumbwick – a horny, embittered old man with a papier maché head. Both uncomfortable and hilarious, it’s recreating some of that Fringe magic by being staged about as late as Soho Theatre goes, or at least it is for its initial October run. That’s now sold out, but Eley (and Basil) will be back for another crack at it in January 2027.

Thanks to the ongoing cult behemoth that is Taskmaster, its host Greg Davies finds his stand up career hitting new highs, with a month of shows at the Apollo for his new show Full Fat Legend to be followed in December with his debut at the O2 – his biggest show to date. Despite the immodest name, the new show is, in essence, an autobiographical exploration of what an idiot he is. 

Singing sisters Flo & Joan – aka Nicola and Rosie Dempsey – had taken a little step back from their own burgeoning success as purveyors of comic song via their highly successful Andrew Lloyd Webber spoof One Man Musical, which did the rounds for ages and gave a big pre-SNL career boost to its star George Fouracres. Precisely what to expect from With Feeling we’re not sure: lots of funny songs, that’s for certain, but the slightly vague press release suggests a concept: ‘they use another “real band’s” setlist to write their own show’, apparently. What does this mean? We’ll find out soon!