Laurie Kilmartin is not afraid of vulgarity. The Peabody award-winner flits between penis jokes, free-bleeding chaos and a taste for vengeance in this scattergun hour that marks her London debut. Having made her career as a staff writer for Jimmy Kimmel and Conan O’Brien, Kilmartin’s own voice is crude, acute and pretty mean, delivering each dark joke with a furrowed-brow intensity, followed by a flash of a wide, are-you-gonna-take-it smile.
Jumping through the decades, the US comedian cycles through school bullies, the need for better assassins, and the limited dating pool of men over 50. There’s a pitch-black quality to some of these tales, with a particular knife-edge to her story of an abusive swim coach. Other anecdotes feel drier, like they’ve just had the dust blown off them; she settles too long on lockdowns, which I thought we’d all agreed we were done talking about long ago. Even a moment on Charlie Kirk feels like it missed the moment, though other elements of her US political commentary are easy winners.
Kilmartin wrote on the last two years of the Oscars ceremonies, and she’s most confident in the swing of finely tuned bits, delivered with a blazing bullishness. But since the show’s structure is loose and fragmented, she flounders for a few seconds every time she moves from one often-unrelated set piece to the next. She’s less commanding in the moments of audience participation, with one callback to a story of language failure in Japan provided by an audience member instead of the comedian.
It’s clear from the amount of haphazard reference checks and mid-story math conversions that she’s not used to UK crowds. At times this gives the show the feel of a work-in-progress, and there’s an oddly distracting focus on the difference between her (American, single mum) and her audience (tonight: neither of those), which we wouldn’t mind at all if she didn’t keep mentioning it. Over the course of the hour, the tone of Kilmartin’s performance is somewhat standoffish, and she repeatedly dismisses us as light clappers. But the more she leans into this, the funnier we find it. Matching the clean brutality of her best anecdotes, severity suits her.
