Review - Comedian Gary Delaney had us in stitches at sell-out Kettering show

Gary Delaney’s jokes cannot be republished in a family newspaper like ours. They probably shouldn’t be told to family members.

And they definitely should not be said in a church – but that’s exactly what happened when the comedian visited Kettering on Friday night (June 9).

He took great delight in reeling off 250 one-liners at Kettering Arts Centre in St Andrew’s Church in Lindsay Street, a venue which he said ‘made filthy jokes feel deliciously filthier’.

The irony of telling such jokes while standing next to a pulpit was not lost on him, with the occasional glance above lapped up by the sell-out crowd of almost 300.

The 50-year-old was on night 287 of his Gary in Punderland tour and it showed with a polished performance.

He records all of his shows on a dictaphone so he can listen back and assess how audiences reacted to each bit of material, what he could have done better and whether he could have got away with more (or pushed it too far).

Most comedians tell stories and build up to a punchline, but Delaney is not most comedians. Every line is a punchline, giving the audience no respite and leaving us with a face that almost ached from more than an hour of constant laughing.

Many of the jokes are so obvious that he doesn’t even need to get to the punchline before the giggling audience work out what’s next. And that’s the beauty of his work.

Delaney began the night by testing the water and soon realised he would have to go pretty hard to offend us.

He carries a clipboard of his ‘worst’ jokes that he reaches for when the crowd responds with a sharp ‘ooooh’, suggesting he might have gone too far. When this happens he knowingly smiles and doubles down with something even worse, much to the audience’s delight.

It took a while to find our tipping point with a joke about waiters but Delaney didn’t need his clipboard much – to the extent that he ended up reading the rest at the end because he barely had to use it.

There were gags about Smurfs, Vernon Kay, PE teachers, vegan sausage rolls, chemists, yoga, yappy dogs and bags for life, three jokes that his wife, fellow comedian Sarah Millican, hates and a couple about Corby for good measure.

But the Mock The Week star is not just a man who stands there and reads one-liner after one-liner. There’s Amazon reviews, dad jokes, Wikipedia entries, test material for his next tour and Twitter jokes on a screen during the interval.

We were treated to a special ‘Kettering ending’ of some of the jokes from his last show that got the most complaints.

But there were absolutely no complaints from the Kettering crowd who spent the night in stitches.

To see where Gary Delaney is performing on his tour or to book tickets visit https://www.garydelaney.com/live/.