Capacity: Perhaps a hundred, depending on how closely people are squeezed together. On this night, there were about 72 people in, give or take 2.
The theme: Alex Horne doesn't do themes, he does projects. A seemingly endless capability to generate wheezes and the energy to pursue them, means that this year's show – on the heels of last year's birdwatching competition – contains threads of several schemes, from persuading people to celebrate their TK day (their 10,000th day alive) to meeting a person from each country in the world now resident in London, to – and this forms the thrust of his show - getting a new word, or at least a new meaning, into the dictionary.
High point: Such is the enthusiasm with which Horne attacks his projects, he generates great anecdotes along the way: from pretending to be his mum on Five Live to his love/hate relationship with the author of a book called Balderdash and Piffle and a showdown with George Aligayah on BBC news. He's a good storyteller too, his measured pace ideal for setting up a surprising reveal, and he uses audiovisual material as well as any comic on the Fringe.
Weak spot: You'll smile, you'll nod appreciatively, you might even chuckle, but it's unlikely you'll laugh very much. For the truth is that, for all Horne's engrossing pursuits, he doesn't have a lot of jokes in his set. It's seems typical that, when he does bring a gag to the fore, a pun on his dad's experiences in a tiddlywinks factory, he does so only as a starting point to tracking that joke's journey into the world and its appearance in unlikely places.
Audience participation: Lots. Before the show the crowd are asked to invent their own new words. After the show they are encouraged to spread Horne's words into the world. During the show they're involved too: a guy called Johnny firstly allows Horne to calculate his age in days (in order to better work out his TK day) and then, by coincidence, has his suggestion for a neologism read out to the crowd. The word was Tristanning, the practice of giving your children unnecessarily pretentious names.
Comic equation: (The imagination of Borges x the perseverance of Odysseus) - Jimmy Carr
Mark out of 10: 7
Put this on your poster: A refreshingly honest set of fun and games will have you honking for more!
