Joe Lycett: If Joe Lycett Then You Should've Put A Ring On It

Joe Lycett opens with a great one-liner. He delivers it from offstage, saying it didn't really fit in with the rest of the set. It's a fair point: the fact that this show is a roaring success owes less to the jokes, though there are plenty of good ones, more to the charisma of the man himself. A winning combination of traits—ebullience, cattiness, breezy condescension—come together in a process of comedic voodoo to produce irresistible likeability. "Oooh, you're a student, what do you study?" he asks a blushing punter, for all the world as though this is interesting information, and seems pained that this brief conversation has to end. 

His supreme confidence conceals the fact that this is a pretty slight hour of comedy. There are stretches of filler, such as when Lycett challenges the crowd to guess the gayness ratings awarded by some dumb website to a bunch of inanimate objects. The best bits come when Lycett reads out the bitchy letters he has written in naughty moments to people and institutions which have riled him (the list is long). An exchange between a Lycett alter-ego and a long-suffering commissioning editor at The Sun is glorious.

All this seems to come so naturally that you yearn to see him tested, to find out what heights of bitchiness he could attain if he were put under pressure. It would be interesting to see him deal with a heckler, for instance. It's a moot point, though – nobody's heckling Joe Lycett.