This Must Be Heaven: John Tothill @ Komedia

John Tothill, resplendent in an emerald green velvet shirt of such determined feyness it practically had its own postcode, is a one-man salon disguised as a comedy show, and Komedia is entirely complicit.

The shirt tells you everything. Peacock-adjacent, unapologetically soft, worn by a man who is camp as a bank holiday weekend in Croydon yet possessed of a disarming, charmingly readable ...... hmm whatness? Because Tothill is, by his own accounts, a heterosexual man who has done considerable, admirable work on the architecture of his own masculinity. He is the woke rake: a straight man who has sat with himself long enough to come out the other side considerably more interesting. Brighton's queer crowd clocked this immediately. He isn't performing allyship; but has dismantled enough of the scaffolding of conventional masculinity to move with a more elegant gait. A straight man, yes but one who has clearly done the reading.

The show's thesis is gluttony, not as sin but as philosophy. In a world neck-deep in vicious selfish greed, Tothill argues, we might as well indulge our better hungers with gratitude rather than grimace. Victorian oyster-thief Edward Dando makes a unlikely cameo as moral exemplar, a doomed cruise ship gig provides the punchline and moral underscore, and a Fringe medical emergency is metabolised into material with impressive breezy authority.

The throw away magic act is daft, effective, and hints at sly depths, the trick up the sleeve of a man who knows precisely what he's doing at all times while performing elaborate innocence. More remarkable still is a teacher's gift for remembering names and details, engaging crowd work delivered not as ambush but as warm, specific connection, making a hundred strangers feel like a room full of old friends.

Tothill offers something almost radical: joy. The result is less stand-up set, more glittering salon with wit as survival strategy, pleasure as resistance. Joy in his audience, in ideas, in history's odder footnotes, in the absurdity and abundance of being alive in a world that keeps offering buffets.

He's a funny philosophy lecture in emerald velvet, sharing an hour that sends you back into the world better fed.

This Must Be Heaven: John Tothill currently on tour, full details here