Sapphire McIntosh @ Underbelly Bristo Square

Sapphire McIntosh has led a remarkable life. For a time as a teenager, she lived in a hostel for unhoused people. Later, she played football for Leeds United. Recently, she was cast in the new season of Apple TV hit Ted Lasso. In her debut hour, we get to know McIntosh very well.

It’s a stand-up skill that can go unremarked because it feels so casual: McIntosh gets across a great deal of herself without ever rushing or boring. She starts on familiar ground, spending a little time on regional accents and declaring “I make being Northern my whole personality”. But lines like that sell McIntosh short: once she’s found her rhythm (and, perhaps, left her club set behind), Mcintosh finds her sweet spot with barbed but always funny musings on race, class and creativity.

Some stand-up debuts struggle with what they have to offer. Not McIntosh, who arrives overflowing with stories about, say, her South-East London housing co-op, the local Millwall fans, and sharing a roof with people who, as she puts it, “are obsessed with Black revolution but have no Black friends”.

McIntosh teases out these social dynamics with an open heart and a sharp eye. It’s an approach that has won her a following on TikTok, with a string of satirical posts imagining Spam’s return to prominence in a dystopic future ushered in by the rise of Farage and Reform. Keen to build on that viral success, McIntosh perhaps dwells a little too much on Spam (there is, of course, a Spam t-shirt), but enters a much more exciting space when she fleshes out that dystopia, including a surreal riff on a dream of dispensing petrol from her left breast. 

With the confidence to leave her bankable club material behind in favour of this talent for imageneering and social skewering, Sapphire McIntosh may soon be a distinctive new voice in comedy.

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Sapphire McIntosh: Squeaky Bum Time, Underbelly Bristo Square (Daisy), until 30 Aug (not 18), 5.45pm, £12-14