Parsons Knows

Andy Parsons, Shrewsbury Music Hall, Shrewsbury, Sunday September 16 2007, 8pm.

Being a comedian is hard work, so Dead Kenny took the day off and went to see Andy Parsons live at The Music Hall, in the company of Gisbourne and Neal. Parsons is the balding guy with a high-pitched southern accent who's a regular on late-night comedy panel show Mock The Week and he's a professional comedian for the very good reason he's rather effective at making people laugh.

Reviewing comedy gigs is not a Parallax View forte also for a good reason - we're usually too busy careering from chuckling to chortling to take down notes of which gags worked or didn't, and your crap correspondent can never remember jokes at the best of times, unless they've been directly aimed at his friends. And while Parsons gets mucho mileage from the front row (a lady in a woollen beret with unfortunate toilet timing, a crisp-chombling chap and a fat bloke called Fred and his teacher wife coming in for particular attention) as well as singling out the bloke behind us who shouted 'Woo!' at the beginning, my companions for the night survived unscathed.

So as we can't remember specific gags you'll have to take your hoho-ing hack's word for it that Parsons represents good value-for-money in terms of solid quickfire material that, while remaining topical, should appeal to a broad audience range. Gordon Brown and David Cameron came in for roughly equal amounts of stick with defensive teachers ('I've got marking, you know!') and the good folk of Telford (always goes down well in Shrewsbury!) also heavily targeted. Unlike the likes of Richard Herring though, there were no surreal elements as such in the material so your concluding correspondent will contribute by saying that throughout he laughed like a train.