Tom Houghton

****

Class Half Empty at Komedia, Brighton, March 19

SOMETIMES when a comedian bursts onto the scene you just know they’re going to be big, very big.

Tom Houghton, son of former Chief of the Defence of the British Armed Forces Nick Houghton, is one such chap.

Oozing confidence (admittedly with more than a soupçon of braggadocio) the former Brighton resident made a triumphant return to the city with his first national tour, Class Half Empty.

A “posh t**t” whose childhood involved boarding school from the age of six and training in what to do if kidnapped, it’s inevitable that class is at the root of most of his comedy.

There’s certainly a rich seam to be mined when you live in the Tower of London and have dined with the Queen.

Growing up surrounded by toffs (“We would run away from the pigs but they were all in blankets”) Houghton skilfully negotiated the balance of acknowledging his privileged background at the same time as ridiculing it.

The laughs thinned slightly during an uncomfortable, over-long skit involving an unfortunate in the front row, and some of the tales of riotous japes involving alcohol, prostitutes and a duck strayed into distinctly laddish territory, but 99 per cent of the time the audience was on side.

Well-observed, expertly honed anecdotes about human relationships were dotted with straight up gags and classic one liners (“A lot of children have to come out to their parents… I had to go IN”), delivered with consummate ease.

Years of performing as part of improvisation group The Noise Nextdoor have ensured the talented comic is more than able to think on his feet, and comparisons with fellow public school comedian Jack Whitehall are of course unavoidable.

Houghton has the same accomplished effortlessness on stage, particularly with some of his clever analogies and self-deprecating material.

His mother’s increasingly desperate attempts to speak to him on the phone being likened to the seven stages of grief was a stroke of pure mastery.