It Is Better
It Is Better is a brand new show by John-Luke Roberts, with music by John Chambers. It’s been created specifically to be listened to – ideally in the evening, in a comfortable chair, by a warm fire, with a nice drink, while long-thought extinct beasts rampage through the streets outside.
Plans to record a live LP were scuppered by the pandemic. John-Luke says “I realised my favourite comedy records didn’t have an audience. So I sat down thinking of albums like Sir Henry at Rawlinson End and Ivor Cutler’s Dandruff and grew more and more excited at the prospect. Without an audience, a comedy record can achieve a startling intimacy.”
To help achieve this Roberts teamed up with John Chambers, a composer whose work in theatre includes collaborations with Steven Berkoff (Biblical Tales and Oedipus) and John Cleese (Bang Bang), and who scored BBC Drama on 3’s critically acclaimed new version of The Cherry Orchard.
The album artwork is by photographer Natasha Pszenicki, featuring a doll’s house scale comedy club built by Roberts during lockdown. He says “they closed the comedy clubs and the theatres, so I built one as a not-entirely-successful coping mechanism.”
Originally performed in 2021
About John-Luke-A-Palooza
John-Luke-A-Palooza! includes all ten of John-Luke Roberts’ Edinburgh Fringe shows from 2010 to 2022, recorded over two Sundays in 2024.
It is accompanied by a free podcast called
John-Luke-A-Palodcast!,
discussing each show.
This project, where J-LR performed all of his previous shows on consecutive days, began at the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe and was filmed shortly after by Go Faster Stripe.
You can watch all the shows individually—or via a John-Luke-A-Palooza series pass—on the
Go Faster Stripe website.
ALL John-Luke-A-Palooza Films
John-Luke-A-Palodcast: It Is Better
Please welcome guest host Alice Fraser who chats to JLR both about the lockdown favourite "It is Better" and more generally about the absurd notion of revisiting all ten shows.
Originally performed in 2021
It Is Better is a brand new show by John-Luke Roberts, with music by John Chambers. It’s been created specifically to be listened to – ideally in the evening, in a comfortable chair, by a warm fire, with a nice drink, while long-thought extinct beasts rampage through the streets outside.
Plans to record a live LP were scuppered by the pandemic. John-Luke says “I realised my favourite comedy records didn’t have an audience. So I sat down thinking of albums like Sir Henry at Rawlinson End and Ivor Cutler’s Dandruff and grew more and more excited at the prospect. Without an audience, a comedy record can achieve a startling intimacy.”
To help achieve this Roberts teamed up with John Chambers, a composer whose work in theatre includes collaborations with Steven Berkoff (Biblical Tales and Oedipus) and John Cleese (Bang Bang), and who scored BBC Drama on 3’s critically acclaimed new version of The Cherry Orchard.
The album artwork is by photographer Natasha Pszenicki, featuring a doll’s house scale comedy club built by Roberts during lockdown. He says “they closed the comedy clubs and the theatres, so I built one as a not-entirely-successful coping mechanism.”
