The final time I noticed Frankie Monroe, the impish, barely grubby proprietor of Rotherham’s premier fictional working males’s membership, The Misty Moon, he was in an Edinburgh basement, delighting festivalgoers with tips, songs and cheeky characters. Sadly, we found because the present unfolded, the membership was additionally a portal to hell. The evening ended with Frankie – white-faced, in a shiny shirt and ludicrous shoulder pads – sucked into the fiery depths.
It hasn’t completed him a lot hurt. Tonight, we’re at Manchester’s Fairfield Social Membership, and Frankie is internet hosting a pub quiz with all of the swaggering appeal that noticed his creator, 26-year-old Joe Kent-Walters, named greatest newcomer at this yr’s Edinburgh comedy awards.
It’s an actual quiz, Kent-Walters promised earlier within the day, “however in case you go in an excessive amount of such as you need to win, you’ll be infuriated”. There are questions on meat, service stations, disgraced males and “Nice British bottoms”. Right solutions are superfluous: factors are deducted for swots and snitches and added for the most effective bribes.
West Yorkshire-born Kent-Walters’s comedy persona is impressed by the mischievous older males he encountered at working males’s golf equipment whereas visiting his dad’s household, and later within the native membership he frequented. His favourites had been these with the philosophy “You may’t child a kidder”, who had been all the time making an attempt to confound you for amusing. “I like being tricked,” Kent-Walters says. “I cherished assembly these characters as a child. Then later we’d go ingesting and get picked on by the outdated guard, however on this means that was actually heat and humorous. I simply love that world. I felt so fortunate to have the ability to see it, rising up.”
Frankie Monroe is an embodiment of these reminiscences. In Kent-Walters’s present touring present, he steals wallets, challenges viewers members to unwinnable video games and dares us to the touch his “particular trowel” (there’s a wildly catchy tune in regards to the trowel in query that you just’ll be chanting days later). Alongside his Edinburgh success, Frankie took Kent-Walters to victory on the 2023 BBC new comedy award, incomes a BBC radio pilot, which he’s engaged on now. He additionally gained the 2021 Chortle pupil comedy awards, as high-status “theatre wanker” Eduardo Soliloquy.
Kent-Walters grew up in Denby Dale, a bus trip away from Huddersfield. “It was rural Yorkshire, very conventional,” he says. He remembers getting back from college carrying vibrant trousers: “You couldn’t get away with that.” His dad and mom, from working-class households in Billingham and Dunscroft, had been each social staff, and “very encouraging of the humanities … I cherished comedy as a result of they cherished it. They’d play Vic and Bob, The Mighty Boosh, The League of Gents. All the things, actually.”
His mum remembers him entertaining the household on caravan holidays and, after he carried out in a faculty play, signed him up for youth theatre at Huddersfield’s Lawrence Batley theatre. “That made me fall in love with performing,” he says. “I obtained to be bizarre.” Kent-Walters has “a little bit bit of an obsession with the outdated world of leisure”. Frankie celebrates the variety-style nights that as soon as graced the phases of working males’s golf equipment. “That’s been left to slowly die, and nothing has crammed that void of community-based leisure,” he says.
In his early teenagers, after watching a documentary about George Formby, he turned fixated with the Wigan-born entertainer. He joined the George Formby Society and obtained a banjolele for Christmas. “My dad and mom needed to look at regular telly and I insisted on placing these black-and-white George Formby movies on.” He began enjoying Formby’s songs on stage at The Purple Shed, “a tiny little Labour membership” in Wakefield. “I’d rewrite Formby songs to be like ‘Fuck David Cameron!’” In hindsight, “that was the primary time I began performing comedy”.
He went to review theatre on the College of Leeds. He cherished that it was “efficiency art-adjacent” and allowed him to indulge his curiosity in comedy historical past. He obtained “actually obsessed” researching arts actions equivalent to Dada, seeing how they related to performers equivalent to Vic Reeves.
At his first Edinburgh fringe in 2017, performing in a critical play however decided to discover the competition’s comedy choices, Kent-Walters discovered The Different Comedy Memorial Society, a late-night fringe staple the place performers attempt their most outlandish concepts, and was confronted with “a fever dream of mad stuff”, he says. “Issues I’d grown up loving, like The Mighty Boosh, you don’t realise it has its roots in stay comedy. I bear in mind turning to my good friend and saying: ‘I need to be an alternate comic.’”
Again in Leeds, he began a month-to-month gig with associates in his pupil basement. It was referred to as ACID – Different Comedy, It’s Downstairs. It supplied area to experiment: “I used to do an act referred to as 21 Service Baggage. I’d be carrying service luggage and do a little bit of a strip tease, take them off and there’d be a gag in each bag. Or I’d simply put a pillowcase on my head and eat beans.”
He was additionally a part of an artwork collective with coursemates – they’d placed on themed, immersive occasions, with roaming characters, video games and DJs, the partying interrupted by performances. A village fete-themed social gathering, with do-it-yourself stalls and bunting, wanted a number, and Frankie was born. “He got here out the gate absolutely fashioned,” says Kent-Walters, preserving the festivities going till a “hell ritual” was carried out at midnight. There have been shades of this in Frankie’s fringe debut: flavours of horror, interactive video games and a giant demonic finale.
He began performing comedy past the basement, though not but as Frankie. “That was such a steep studying curve. Everybody thinks you’re nice on this bubble of artwork faculty” he says, “then immediately you’re performing to a plumber.”
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His greatest pal from faculty, Mikey Bligh-Smith, had additionally been experimenting with different comedy whereas learning in Bristol. “He had a personality satirising a Bristolian hipster referred to as Mandy Visuals,” Kent-Walters says. The pair fashioned a double act, the Beautiful Boys, finally performing a (very enjoyable) hour on the 2022 fringe. They had been fascinated by clowning and enrolled at eminent French faculty École Philippe Gaulier, whose alumni embrace Viggo Venn, Emma Thompson and Elf Lyons. “You spend a very long time in comedy feeling like issues are very not official,” says Kent-Walters. “With clowning, there’s a strategy, there’s a lineage, it sits in a cultural historical past. That felt thrilling to me.”
There’s a story that clown faculty breaks you down. “That fable’s perpetuated as a result of most individuals there haven’t died on their arse in Barnsley,” he argues. There’s additionally a sense of exclusivity. It’s not low cost, says Kent-Walters, who labored by way of the pandemic to avoid wasting for tuition, and it’s true there have been “some actually posh folks”. However there’s one other facet to it. “I like the philosophy: everyone seems to be humorous,” he says. His largest epiphany was in regards to the significance of tips: “That’s a great point to look at, to suppose one thing’s going a method then it strikes within the different route.” He additionally realised his efficiency was greatest when he approached comedy “with lightness”.
Frankie Monroe felt like the right character for these rules – he’d all the time been a trickster – and Kent-Walters began constructing an hour-long present, recruiting the director Jon Oldfield. “There was an fascinating level growing the present the place I used to be like: has it obtained to have a that means?” He realised there was already deeper significance: lamenting the lack of golf equipment like The Misty Moon and the cultural life they held.
Again on the pub quiz, virtually everybody has had factors deducted for swot behaviour, and there have been appearances from wonderful native comedians together with Freddie Hayes and Molly McGuinness. Kent-Walters treats us to a brand new character, Vegas Dave, “a type of Brits overseas man; he runs a membership in Magaluf” who will get the room singing. It’s a style of Kent-Walters’s subsequent stay present: in 2025, Frankie will emerge from hell, with new associates. “I’ve obtained a picture of a giant headstone, ‘RIP Frankie Monroe’, everybody’s coming in sombre, funeral vibes. Then he’s bursting out, digging himself out with the trowel.”
He hopes there could possibly be a spot for Frankie on TV – maybe internet hosting a present like Alan Partridge or Mrs Merton. However he’s making an attempt to not get swept up in post-awards hype, as a substitute specializing in making new issues. He’s simply moved from Sheffield to Manchester – for love, and for its rising different comedy scene. “It’s an thrilling place to be,” he says, “however there’s a lot strain to maneuver to London. You second-guess your self.”
Recommendation from mentor determine John Kearns helped. “He was like: ‘Have a good life.’ We’ve obtained this concept of the unhappy clown, however the actuality is, in case you’re having a greater time, folks need to watch you extra,” he says. “I wish to imagine that in case you’re simply good and also you’re good on the job, it’ll all work out. I’m sticking by that.”
Joe Kent-Walters Is … Frankie Monroe LIVE!!! is at Soho theatre, London, 25 to 30 November, and excursions the UK in 2025.
