Having a comedian previously best known as a poet occupy the traditionally lairy 11pm slot, especially on a Saturday night, might sound like something of a crucible. Happily, when said wordsmith can spit out such seething sonnets as ‘Rylan Clark is a Fucking Stupid Cunt’, it does make you breathe a sigh of relief that some poor Poundland Keats isn’t about to be sacrificed to a baying mob hungry for dick jokes. Also happily, there’s far more to Bróccán Tyzack-Carlin than just eloquent profanity. This is politically-engaged, scorchingly-performed stand-up studded with mad flights of fancy and kernels of melancholy.

The show is titled after an email received from the RAC after Tyzack-Carlin’s knackered old Alpha Romeo self-immolated en-route to a gig. He sees this oxymoronic statement as one that can be extrapolated to to his own life and the wider world. Through personalities such as Matt Lucas, Michael McIntyre, the aforementioned Rylan, and political fligures like Kier Strarmer, whom he sees collectively as medicore, low-level emblems of wider issues, and the actual bad actors behind them, he threads the personal and political in clever, distinctive, and often bizarre ways.

There’s a running gag he has with an audience member about how his father is absolutely not a dog; there’s a very odd riff about Wes Streeting accosting him in a public bathroom, there are frequent digressions to his trusty poetry notebook that never bring down the show’s tempo, and there’s some brilliant PowerPoint work imagining the few occasions where, ‘Good news! It’s been destroyed’, may be a welcome missive to receive.

As a performer you can see various strains of influence at work here. There is something in his fondness for whipcrack asides within his own jokes, and split-second crowd banter (‘He’s not a dog!’ is a good example) that echoes Andrew O’Neill, though Tyzack-Carlin is not quite as sustained in his surrealism; there is the trenchant rhetoric of a Mark Steel; and the billious hatred for banality in all its forms that marked much of Bill Hicks‘ material. It all becomes together in a style that feels uniquely Bróccán’s, which is an achievement in and of itself.

Tyzack-Carlin admits himself that this is far from a nuanced hour. It’s strident, furious, and isn’t interested in any mealy-mouthed ‘both-sides’ equivocation. There’s a fucking brutal Charlie Kirk joke there, for example. It is also a very funny, and frequently surprising show. You wouldn’t necessarily expect a stand-up/ poetry hybrid to to have such fluent, well-integrated narrative, or to be performed at such breakneck speed. When he’s ended the hour with deranged fever dream that reimagines Michael McIntyre‘s ‘The Wheel’ as a particular circle of Dante’s Hell, it’s hard to believe a full hour has passed.

Some will blanch at such invective hurled at people who are far from integral to the enshittification of absolutely everything. While it does occasionally feel like treating the symptoms not the cause, there’s some undeniable catharsis to be had at seeing a performer get it off their chest with such righteous fury.

‘Good News! It’s Been Destroyed‘ is at Below at Pleasance Courtyard until Sat 29 Aug 2026