Jonny Sweet: Mostly About Arthur

“You’re definitely my favourite five people in here!”, gushes Jonny Sweet to groups of his audience entering his show Mostly About Arthur. Affable and unabashedly middle-class, with a Cambridge Footlights background, Sweet’s somewhat toff-like demeanour is instantly engaging. The show is a bizarre elegy to his deceased brother, blurb author extraordinaire Arthur (assumed fictional), and it creates a wonderfully inventive world, coloured with wickedly silly tales.

Sweet giggles and flusters his way through a slideshow illustrating his brother’s life like a schoolboy at show and tell, before getting to the show’s unequivocal highlight: the transformation of the stage into a Starbucks, for a biopic of Arthur. Sweet employs members of the audience as actors/props, while he plays the pretentious director, further playing up to his public school persona as he quips, “You obviously haven’t trained at RADA!”.

Sweet made a name for himself doing sketches as part of comedy trio House of Windsor, and his penchant for sketch comedy is evident. Creating these surreal scenarios arguably takes more creativity than gags based schadenfreude, stereotypes or the use of innuendo to ellicit embarrassed chortles.

There are times when the sketch style works against him and the show feels like one long sketch, with lacklustre bits to fill the time slot. But Sweet has a dry comedic flair, and it's a joy to watch him present his brother’s unspectacular accomplishments as worthy of a blue plaque, with a refreshing lack of the sarcasm or hackneyed self-deprecation favoured by many a lesser comedian.