Fresh from her 2022 Taskmaster win, Sophie Duker, self-proclaimed girls’ school survivor and unreliable narrator (perhaps linked?), performed a sold-out show at the Leadmill last night, and it was an instant hit.
Duker’s comic style is almost as electric as her hot pink combat boots, and her confident yet laid-back approach to interacting with the audience left us at ease to laugh alongside her, while also filled to the brim with that well-known stand-up fear of being singled out of the crowd – AKA the perfect concoction for a night of successful comedy. Unexpected responses from the audience were, I think, few, but Duker was quick on her feet, working those few effortlessly into her own material.
According to Duker, ‘stand-up is so 2019.’ Instead she took us on a story of her life so far. We travelled with her to Ghana, where she and her little brother spent two years of her childhood living with their (definition of a girlboss) grandmother Ma just because ‘it was a bit cheaper’ for her parents. We later joined her on a 700-strong lesbian cruise which proved, for Duker, decidedly unsatisfying, and involved one too many séances for her liking.
This whistle-stop tour of Duker’s life comprised the first half of the show, closed with an anecdote about her ‘mid to late twenties to early thirties’ current self trying, struggling and eventually succeeding to obtain a Ghanaian passport. But at what cost? Well, the cost of her reputation as a comedian. The passport official challenged Duker to prove her profession with a joke, to which Duker could only respond with a (classically horrendous) knock knock joke by Ma from her childhood – performed to a woman who had absolutely no idea what a knock knock joke was.
This was a perfect first-half closer, as Duker offered us in one anecdote a triple threat: a professional identity crisis, a tale of the horrors of bureaucracy to those in the ‘creative’ profession, and a testament to the fact that knock knock jokes will never die. It’s just that some of those among us don’t possess the maturity to appreciate them.
In fact, Duker proved herself throughout the night to be a master of the comic rule of three. I think that only a select few comedians would be able to group things together like she does. For instance, what do Oprah, Beyoncé and Paddington have in common? Answer: they’re such icons that us mere mortals need only use one name. Sophie Duker has two.
Much of Duker’s comedy revolves around her identity and experiences as a black pansexual woman, but I found it refreshing that this was not a point she strove to hone in on, rather using it as a springboard for a whole host of material, the most (and the best) of it bread-focused. Duker does not seek to make her audience – which, to use her own words, in Sheffield was of a predominantly ‘Caucasian persuasion’ – feel guilty for their whiteness or heterosexuality, but a little bit of awkwardness can never hurt. This awkwardness also especially comes as a result of Duker’s narration of her various sexual forays (of varying success rates).
And just as she proudly relates her discovery of and first adventures into the world of pansexuality, Duker is also unafraid to tell all about problems she has had with her own identity. To create a seamless finished product with her more cheerful (bread-based) material, however, she makes these all very light-hearted. In one particular section, Duker tells how she – an apparently avid horoscope denier – discovered that she was born in the Chinese Year of the Horse, and, like the best of us, based her whole identity on this completely nonfactual ‘fact.’ Upon later finding out that she was actually born two days too early to be the majestic horse she thought she was, Duker spiralled. She represented this onstage in a breathlessly rapid and increasingly infuriated list of every single famous horse that she could no longer relate to. She wasn’t Bojack, she wasn’t Red Rum, she wasn’t Artax from the Neverending Story. (‘If anyone knows any more famous horses please tell me… after the show.’) She was Sophie Duker, born in the Year of the Snake. Her set last night truly was comic horseplay at its finest.
And not only that, but it was also satisfyingly cyclical, despite comprising two halves of different material with an outfit change in the interval. Duker recalled at the start of her show that she had already interacted, whether virtually or in person, with two of the Leadmill audience members while travelling to this Sheffield gig. She later invited one of them, alongside two other audience members, to take part in her own version of the BBC hit show The Traitors at the end of her set. I won’t spoil the ending, so all I can say – apart from that I am 100% faithful, I promise on my life – is that Sophie Duker is queen of the awkward silence.
Sophie Duker is currently touring the UK with her show Hag. Tickets available here: https://sophieduker.com/calendar/
