Tom Lucy @ Pleasance Courtyard

A scattershot approach scores some big laughs but could use more focus

Review by Frankie Goodway | 10 Aug 2017

Tom Lucy’s debut show is a perfect example of a decent comic learning the ropes, fast. An early bit of audience interaction seems to wrongfoot him – by the end of the show he’s built it into the set. He has a keen reliance on callbacks, and he overuses them in the last third of his set without building to a larger payoff. The rule of three, however, often eludes him. And, despite not cracking any out until the final ten minutes, Lucy has mastered impressions, with one of the best gags in the set a bilingual punchline to a good routine about travel.

There’s a lot of filler between routines, however, and his pacing feels a bit wonky. A section on his mother, for example, takes up so much of the runtime that it could have been the whole show, avoiding the need for such a scattered set of material. Instead we skip from sex to illness to family to celebrity chefs, and while he segues naturally between topics, the set doesn’t build to anything larger than a one-gag callback. Still, there are some fab one liners that earned deservedly large laughs and, at only 21, Lucy does enough to mark himself out.


Tom Lucy: Needs to Stop Showing Off in Front of His Friends, Pleasance Courtyard (The Cellar), 2-27 Aug (not 14), 6pm, £6.50-£10