I first saw Nutty Noah a couple of years ago at a birthday party with Super Kid. I prepared myself for the usual (yawn worthy) type of act I’d seen before at children’s parties, finding myself a job with the hostess in the kitchen to avoid the cliches. However I soon found myself pulling up a chair and literally crying with laughter at his silly, slightly irreverent humour and innovative presentation of magic, juggling and silly songs. Nutty Noah is absolutely brilliant so when he invited us to see him performing at The Tobacco Factory Bristol during half term I had no hesitation in saying yes please.

I took Wonder Girl and Robo Boy, and was excited to see their reaction. Nutty Noah started with the magic tricks I’ve seen him perform previously. He uses child volunteers and so much of the humour is in his interaction with them. On this occasion he picked some seriously confident children, and they obviously loved being on stage. My favourite moments where seeing him chasing an eight year old girl across the stage with a lump of comedy plastic pooh and the face of a little boy when each time he handed Noah a wand another smaller wand fell out of it’s middle.

As you would expect from the show’s title Nutty Noah uses a lot of pant/pooh/bogey jokes throughout, which the children love. I enjoyed seeing Robo Boy hysterical with laughter over his poo-ta-toe joke, even though he’s seen it three times before. Wonder Girl was also cracking up – she’s never seen anything like this before. The clever bit is that alongside these jokes (which lets face it us less grown up adults enjoy as well) he has some great quick one liners for the grown ups too.

My favourite thing about Nutty Noah’s performance is the silly songs. Firstly he entertains us with his boob-a-thon, a jackets with horns all over it, on which he plays a couple of songs on to start the musical section. Then he treats us to some silly ukulele songs. Several of these are adaptations of popular nursery rhymes like a rendition of ‘Little Miss Muffet’ ending with ‘and she bashed it on the head with the spoon’, a more feminist version perhaps? He also plays a metal frame with about thirty horns attached from which he plays a medley of popular TV theme tunes which is entertaining and skilful.

The show ran for around an hour and a half, ending with several toilet paper canons covering the audience in loo roll. By the end I had definitely connected with my inner five year old and had sore cheeks from laughing so much. The children were also laughing throughout. It’s a pleasure to see a children’s show which doesn’t induce a surreptitious snooze from the accompanying grown up. It’s a real talent to be able to do this, Nutty Noah is the man for the job. You can check out his website here, Facebook fan page here, and You Tube channel here.

*Disclosure: I was provided with tickets to see the show for the purposes of this review.