Pork and Pickle Comedy Club

Pork and Pickle Comedy Club

27 November, 2009
by: Tom Jeffreys

Pork pie, beer, comedy. I mean, literally, could anything be better than that? Um, nope – the Pork and Pickle Comedy Club is basically the best idea ever. So, full of excitement at the prospect of pie, I head over to the Britannia in Hackney to check out the first instalment of this new comedy night. It turns out that the venue (at 360 Victoria Park Road) is a lot further away than I had imagined. The walk from Mare Street nearly does for me, but, to be honest, for truly excellent pork pie I'd walk anywhere.

And what pie it is! Apparently it's homemade by the people at the Britannia, and sheesh, it's good: flaky, buttery pastry, impeccably pink pork (seasoned expertly), and the perfect jelly ratio – enough to keep it all moist and together, but not so much as to become overwhelming. Accompanied by crunchy, zingy pickle and rich oak-aged beer courtesy of Innis & Gunn, this is, truly, a feast fit for a king.

And then there's comedy too. Richard Sandling compères with gusto – he's an easy comic to warm to, with a nice line in geekery. "If the old Doctor Who is the Smiths, then the new one is a horrible Mark Ronson cover version". He does a good job of warming up the audience by getting us all to shout out film quotes like "Gordon's alive!" and "This is Sparta!" and keeps everything light and fun.

First act – sketch group the Real MacGuffins – are slightly hit and miss. Their forays into self-referential meta-comedy are a little grating, but they clearly have some serious punning talent. One sketch sees the English Tourist Board reworking Beatles songs with results like 'Wigan work it out' and 'Hull! I need somebody!' and their closer – three Italian mobsters punning on font names – is completely brilliant.

Lee Kern does jokes about now-standard comedy topics like cancer and the Holocaust, but he's still good. Commenting on the notion that it was the Jewish sense of humour that allowed them to survive persecution, Kern disagrees: "Uncle Mori's gag – good though it was – was simply no match for the fleet of German Panzas."

Will Andrews – doing an incompetent Geordie character routine – is hilarious, until technical issues cut his set sadly short. Still, I love his gag about going into the bank to check his balance. The cashier tells him to stand one leg. Ho, ho.

Headliner, Angelos Epithemiou – the dude with the shopping bags from Shooting Stars – makes a great entrance. With tie tucked into his belt, super short trousers, jazzy socks, and grubby grey anorak, it's quite a look. He does some terrible karaoke and only has three jokes, but this is character comedy, and expertly done.

With line-ups like this, the Pork and Pickle Comedy Club looks set to become a long-running favourite. And the pie, good lord, the pie. I'd walk to the bloody moon for that pie.

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Tom Jeffreys