Review | Jonny and The Baptists at The Wedgewood Rooms, Southsea: 'Making something joyful out of grief'

This isn’t one of those comedy shows, though, where there’s a narrative running throughout and we all get to feel like we’ve learned something profound about the human condition by the end of it.

It is, as they gleefully admit, their attempt to make something joyful out of grief.

Or as they put it more bluntly: ‘A lot of silly bollocks.’

With Jonny Donahoe catching Covid right at the start of the pandemic – only for it to become long-Covid, and Paddy Gervers (‘The Baptists’) simultaneously having a mental breakdown, they claim to represent a microcosm of the nation.

This show is their attempt to make sense of it.

But as Jonny says: ‘We were weird before Covid. Two years of not leaving the house hasn't made us more mainstream...’

They rightly skewer the government’s ham-fisted campaign to get people in the arts to retrain – remember the adverts: ‘Fatima's next job could be in cyber’?

But in their hands, this becomes a song about creating their own detective agency as it’s the only thing they’ve got the skills for after watching endless crime dramas on daytime TV.

There’s also Cocaine Gran about a nonagenarian Scarface with its hilariously bloody climax. It’s all a metaphor for post-Brexit Britain apparently. Honest.

We learn the quickest way to win the Duke of Edinburgh gold award – which definitely upset any royalists in the room.

And the stupidity of the alt-right movement as typified by Laurence Fox gets pilloried in the super-funky Dude Gang.

We also get a couple of songs from their unfinished Christian musical (they’re not religious, it’s a practicality – Christians buy a lot of merch).

And if there’s anything funnier than Donahoe channelling God in a manic fervour about the greatness of frogs, then I’ve not seen it in a while.

There is a stream of righteous anger that is often close to the surface, but it never overruns the laughs.

Given that the show was supposedly about grief, you wouldn’t be surprised to hear it induced tears.

Fortunately they were tears of laughter.