London Hughes, To Catch a D*ck, Bloomsbury Theatre, review: this comedian's rise to super stardom is no joke
When London Hughes called her 2017 stand-up show Superstar, it was a kind of joke. Now, it looks like a prophecy. The 30-year-old’s ascent to the top has been nothing short of dizzying.
Just five months ago, the Croydon comic was still largely unknown, and debuting her new show To Catch a D*ck in a poky 50-seat Edinburgh attic. It was an hour of joyous filth, delivered with the megawatt confidence of Beyoncé at Coachella. In that room, Hughes was a stadium floodlight trapped in a broom-cupboard.
The show was shortlisted for the Edinburgh Comedy Award - making Hughes the first black British woman to be nominated in the prize’s 40-year history - and has transformed her career. It’s about to be turned into a Netflix special, produced by the world’s highest-earning comedian, Kevin Hart. And as soon as that’s over, she’s making an NBC sitcom about her life.
It may well be that Hughes soon leaves behind both Britain and live comedy for good, to seek TV stardom in the states, which would be a terrible shame. London would be a quieter, emptier place without London. There are few comics on the circuit who can match her charisma, as she proved this weekend, reviving To Catch a D*ck for two sold-out farewell shows in a theatre 10 times the size of that Edinburgh attic.
Coming onstage in a red velvet playsuit and “Beyoncé’s hair from 2003”, twerking ebulliently, Hughes began with a kind of apology: “I hear one-woman shows are meant to be deep and meaningful...” This one, thankfully, isn’t. The asterisked title does not stand for duck, and “the penis isn’t a metaphor for my father’s love.” Sometimes (paging, Freud) a knob is just a knob.
What makes Hughes’s blue stand-up special is the depth of experience behind it. She’s lived a wild life, and packs more eye-popping anecdotes into this hour than some comics her age manage in a whole career. It’s a fact driven home acutely by her impression of a posh young Cambridge-educated observational stand-up with nothing to say. Hughes’s stories about dating an Olympic gold-medallist, a foot fetishist and a heroin-addicted investment banker are only beaten by the tale of how she was sacked from her first TV gig - as a presenter for Babestation - before immediately landing a job at CBBC.
Playing to a packed house peppered with top comedians (including Richard Herring and Richard Gadd - and that’s just the Dicks), Hughes grew to fill the room, making the most of her considerable physical comedy chops. She shimmied across the stage, punctuated gags by breaking into dance, and mimed different oral sex techniques - “The Seagull”, “Brian Blessed” - broadly enough for everyone in the back row.
In her pacing, however, Hughes sometimes overcompensated for the space, hammering home the punchlines repeatedly just in case the balcony might have missed them, then waiting until the final wave of laughter had run dry. It undermined an otherwise excellent bit on comedy’s dating double-standard: female comics are dismissed as “too much” and doomed to singledom, while their male counterparts become unlikely sex symbols, dating “otherworldly wheatgrass-infused bitches”. As a throwaway line, it’d be a witty turn of phrase, but not when it’s repeated a third and fourth time. This is nitpicking of the highest order, however: when a show has as much raucous energy as To Catch a D*ck, you can't expect it to dot all the is.
London Hughes is at the Bloomsbury Theatre on Saturday. Tickets: ucl.ac.uk
