Bong! “It’s not often I get heckled by Big Ben,” says comedian Fern Brady. Nor buttonholed mid-set by a passing homeless man, which happens moments after Ben has bonged. This is Live at Parliament Square, one of three alfresco comedy gigs as part of Occupy London’s Festival of Democracy, an election week’s worth of free talks, workshops and events in the shadow of the UK House of Commons.
The impresario is Edinburgh comedy award-nominee Liam Williams, who as MC has his work cut out geeing up a small and windswept crowd huddled on tarpaulins at his feet. No one ever mistook downbeat Williams for a hype man, but he does a fine job, keeping things lively as watchful policemen peer from behind the makeshift stage.
Williams’s own material is best tailored to the occasion, as he riffs on his sense of political impotence – and his self-loathing for submitting to it. He imagines a droll dialogue with a spokesperson for “the 1%” – the “trickle-down effect” can seldom have been better skewered – and a tart riff on the bylaws governing Parliament Square, which ends with Williams illegally pitching a pop-up tent. “Does anyone want to model this, so we can see how horrid it is to look at a human sheltering?”
Few of the other acts – Bridget Christie appears on 7 May – grapple with politics. Gein’s Family Giftshop perform black-comedy sketches; Brady jokes about her Scottish accent, but I wait for Scottish National party material in vain. Ahir Shah alone rivals Williams for relevance, with a cracking set imagining a sell-out future Green government, in hock to “big quinoa”, and tagging Tesco’s £70 patio heaters as a symbol of our self-indulgence as the eco-apocalypse looms. It’s a fine joke, but at this shivering stage of the evening I’d have swapped it for an actual patio heater in a heartbeat.
• At Parliament Square, London, 7 and 9 May.
