Review: Southampton Comedy Society’s ‘The Big Online Hobbit’

Southampton Comedy Society hosted their first ever online comedy show this past Tuesday (23rd June), with their usual comedy nights at The Hobbit being temporarily out of commission due to our lovely friend Miss Rona. The show was good in parts, but fell a bit flat in others.

The society started out the gate strong, with two great stand up routines from a couple of the society’s top-notch comedians, even complete with the classic ‘Laugh’ audience signs. Opening a show is hard enough with an audience, but without one it must’ve felt near impossible – so big props to the two comedians who chose to open the night. As the second comedian of the night said, ‘doing stand up without an audience is like doing opioid-free heroin’; all the risk but none of the immediate gratification.

I’m afraid, however, that the night began to plateau a tad from there, with a few ups and downs. The musical breaks, especially those from Finn Murphy, with his Welsh Spiderman song being a personal favourite (it’s been stuck in my head the past few days it’s so damn catchy), were all brilliant. Also big shout out to Sacha Wood for her beautiful original song. However some of the sketches didn’t quite meet the mark. The ‘Best Friend Challenge’ sketch was funny at first, but I think it went on a tad too long, so the hilarity of the bitchiness between the 3 friends was lost after a while. The ‘Tarantino foot-fetish’ sketch was most definitely my favourite of the night, and that’s not just because I’m a film student with an inane dislike of Tarantino and his general creepy demeanour. Comedic timing was PERFECT here, as well as the dialogue; almost makes me wish that it went on a bit longer because it was so funny.

The stand up sets of the night were definitely the highlights in my opinion. Of course, the return of Emmy Jane Bradfield’s erotic fan-fiction routine is always appreciated and ALWAYS gets a laugh out of me (the fake moustache is a great touch), but I also really loved a set that focused on a fear of the police which was pre-recorded, but feels overwhelmingly relevant with the current political social climate.

For their first online show, I think that the society really did a good job, I genuinely do. I think, however, that the lack of an audience was very dearly felt, although that’s no fault of the society at all and is obviously completely out of their hands. Awkward pauses lasted just a tad too long, and some parts could have flowed better, but overall it was still a pretty entertaining night. I’m curious to see what the Comedy Society are going to do next with all these current restrictions on live entertainment.