One split bill, two queer, neurodivergent comedians,  sweaty back room of a pub: what’s not to like? Here on an early Friday evening, the weekend still a whirlpool of possibilities, we see two of the best young stand-ups working their way towards a debut hour (or, indeed, two debut hours).

In football parlance, this is a “home” crowd for Jen Zheng and Beck Walker, the audience split evenly between friends and acolytes of both comics.

Accordingly, each sticks to the other comedian’s friends for crowd work, which is warm hearted, silly, and delightful.

First up is Walker, a comic who has dealt with staggering health issues in his short life, including being so mentally ill it actually left him physically disabled. 

Engaging and frank, Walker frequently forgets where they are within their material – fatal stuff for most stand-ups, but here it merely adds to the persona’s charm. Material about being in a wheelchair – and society’s unbelievably fash-coded expectations of how people in wheelchairs should behave – is especially brilliant, but it’s all interesting, illuminating, and thought-provoking stuff. 

There’s a full hour to be mined here, once a through-line is found. There could also be a bit more ebb and flow, as this feels a bit like a stretched-out ten minute spot, but when you’re complaining there are too many good jokes, the comedian must be doing something right.

For the second half we have Jen Zheng, divorced polymath, whose fame in other fields (she’s a big cheese animator) is the reason at least some of the audience are here tonight. They probably weren’t expecting her to hand out cured meats from her crotch.

Zheng’s ability to mess with audience expectations is the best in the business. As a queer, autistic, Asian person from Northern Ireland, she’s got important and hilarious things to say about the racism of AI, relationship, gender and sexual expectations, and the banality of getting government emails confirming major life decisions.

As with Walker, Zheng’s set it somewhat scattershot, but hilarious all the same. The only thing stopping her from developing this into a five-star, hour-long show is the question of whether she has the time amid her many other projects.