XS Malarkey Comedy Club #Manchester

Introducing the first of many Manchester comedy updates from Jonathon Dean, the latest addition to the Crispy Comedy Cuts blogging team. He dives straight in with this review of the critically acclaimed XS Malarkey Comedy Club.

Celebrating its 14th birthday this year, Manchester’s award-winning XS Malarkey recently made its triumphant return after a long summer hiatus. Despite its new home at Platt Chapel, Fallowfield, and some new faces in its student-heavy audience, it manages to retain that wonderful niceness that separates XS Malarkey from your everyday comedy club.

Your host, as ever, is the loveable Toby Hadoke, who is regarded as something of a national treasure by the club’s regulars. His friendly, often bewildered demeanour and self-deprecating remarks about his own fashion faux-pas and personal eccentricities help to underline Malarkey’s down-to-earth feel and eschewing of the bland, scathing corporate slickness to which many other comedy clubs aspire.

The club’s determination to offer the opening slots to acts that are new to the circuit has plenty of advantages; as well as injecting new blood into the circuit, it helps to keep the door costs down (£3 for members, £5 for non-members, with a lifetime membership costing a scant £8!), and also means that established acts remember the club from their early days and are happy to return the favour. Regular patrons have been treated to acts like John Bishop, Jason Manford and Jack Whitehall, for the same door price as any other comic.

Platt Chapel and XS Malarkey seem to be a match made in heaven. The self-confessed “community hub” of Platt Chapel, with its volunteer staff and “everyone pitch-in together” approach suits XS Malarkey’s non-profit, newcomer-friendly and fan-loyal ethos down to the ground, bending over backwards to accommodate the club’s many supporters.

It’s a far cry from the pub-venues the club has previously had, who seemingly cared little about the evening as anything other than a device for bringing in punters to the bar – to the point where the previous venue, the (now defunct) Queen of Hearts, didn’t so much as provide heating during last year’s frostbitten winter months. The new venue is a little pricier behind the bar (as many of the student patrons have remarked) but with all the effort and enthusiasm the Chapel’s team bring to the evening, and the sense that the revenue is doing something other than lining a manager’s pockets, it feels somehow better that way.