The last time I saw Frankie Monroe, the impish, slightly grubby proprietor of Rotherham’s premier fictional working men’s club, The Misty Moon, he was in an Edinburgh basement, delighting festivalgoers with tricks, songs and cheeky characters. Unfortunately, we discovered as the show unfolded, the club was also a portal to hell. The night ended with Frankie – white-faced, in a shiny shirt and ludicrous shoulder pads – sucked into the fiery depths.
It hasn’t done him much harm. Tonight, we’re at Manchester’s Fairfield Social Club, and Frankie is hosting a pub quiz with all the swaggering charm that saw his creator, 26-year-old Joe Kent-Walters, named best newcomer at this year’s Edinburgh comedy awards.
It’s a real quiz, Kent-Walters promised earlier in the day, “but if you go in too much like you want to win, you will be infuriated”. There are questions on meat, service stations, disgraced men and “Great British bottoms”. Correct answers are superfluous: points are deducted for swots and snitches and added for the best bribes.
West Yorkshire-born Kent-Walters’s comedy persona is inspired by the mischievous older men he encountered at working men’s clubs while visiting his dad’s family, and later in the local club he frequented. His favourites were those with the philosophy “You can’t kid a kidder”, who were always trying to confound you for a laugh. “I love being tricked,” Kent-Walters says. “I loved meeting those characters as a kid. Then later we’d go drinking and get picked on by the old guard, but in this way that was really warm and funny. I just love that world. I felt so lucky to be able to see it, growing up.”
Frankie Monroe is an embodiment of those memories. In Kent-Walters’s current touring show, he steals wallets, challenges audience members to unwinnable games and dares us to touch his “special trowel” (there’s a wildly catchy song about the trowel in question that you’ll be chanting days later). Alongside his Edinburgh success, Frankie took Kent-Walters to victory at the 2023 BBC new comedy award, earning a BBC radio pilot, which he’s working on now. He also won the 2021 Chortle student comedy awards, as high-status “theatre wanker” Eduardo Soliloquy.
Kent-Walters grew up in Denby Dale, a bus ride away from Huddersfield. “It was rural Yorkshire, very traditional,” he says. He recalls coming back from university wearing colourful trousers: “You couldn’t get away with that.” His parents, from working-class families in Billingham and Dunscroft, were both social workers, and “very encouraging of the arts ... I loved comedy because they loved it. They’d play Vic and Bob, The Mighty Boosh, The League of Gentlemen. Everything, really.”
His mum recalls him entertaining the family on caravan holidays and, after he performed in a school play, signed him up for youth theatre at Huddersfield’s Lawrence Batley theatre. “That made me fall in love with performing,” he says. “I got to be weird.” Kent-Walters has “a little bit of an obsession with the old world of entertainment”. Frankie celebrates the variety-style nights that once graced the stages of working men’s clubs. “That’s been left to slowly die, and nothing has filled that void of community-based entertainment,” he says.
In his early teens, after watching a documentary about George Formby, he became fixated with the Wigan-born entertainer. He joined the George Formby Society and got a banjolele for Christmas. “My parents wanted to watch normal telly and I insisted on putting these black-and-white George Formby films on.” He started playing Formby’s songs on stage at The Red Shed, “a tiny little Labour club” in Wakefield. “I’d rewrite Formby songs to be like ‘Fuck David Cameron!’” In hindsight, “that was the first time I started performing comedy”.
He went to study theatre at the University of Leeds. He loved that it was “performance art-adjacent” and allowed him to indulge his interest in comedy history. He got “really obsessed” researching arts movements such as Dada, seeing how they connected to performers such as Vic Reeves.
At his first Edinburgh fringe in 2017, performing in a serious play but determined to explore the festival’s comedy offerings, Kent-Walters found The Alternative Comedy Memorial Society, a late-night fringe staple where performers try their most outlandish ideas, and was confronted with “a fever dream of mad stuff”, he says. “Things I’d grown up loving, like The Mighty Boosh, you don’t realise it has its roots in live comedy. I remember turning to my friend and saying: ‘I want to be an alternative comedian.’”
Back in Leeds, he started a monthly gig with friends in his student basement. It was called ACID – Alternative Comedy, It’s Downstairs. It provided space to experiment: “I used to do an act called 21 Carrier Bags. I’d be wearing carrier bags and do a bit of a strip tease, take them off and there’d be a gag in every bag. Or I’d just put a pillowcase on my head and eat beans.”
He was also part of an art collective with coursemates – they’d put on themed, immersive events, with roaming characters, games and DJs, the partying interrupted by performances. A village fete-themed party, with homemade stalls and bunting, needed a host, and Frankie was born. “He came out the gate fully formed,” says Kent-Walters, keeping the festivities going until a “hell ritual” was performed at midnight. There were shades of this in Frankie’s fringe debut: flavours of horror, interactive games and a big demonic finale.
He started performing comedy beyond the basement, although not yet as Frankie. “That was such a steep learning curve. Everyone thinks you’re great in this bubble of art school” he says, “then suddenly you’re performing to a plumber.”
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His best pal from school, Mikey Bligh-Smith, had also been experimenting with alternative comedy while studying in Bristol. “He had a character satirising a Bristolian hipster called Mandy Visuals,” Kent-Walters says. The pair formed a double act, the Lovely Boys, eventually performing a (very fun) hour at the 2022 fringe. They were fascinated by clowning and enrolled at eminent French school École Philippe Gaulier, whose alumni include Viggo Venn, Emma Thompson and Elf Lyons. “You spend a long time in comedy feeling like things are very not official,” says Kent-Walters. “With clowning, there’s a methodology, there’s a lineage, it sits in a cultural history. That felt exciting to me.”
There’s a narrative that clown school breaks you down. “That myth’s perpetuated because most people there haven’t died on their arse in Barnsley,” he argues. There’s also a sense of exclusivity. It’s not cheap, says Kent-Walters, who worked through the pandemic to save for tuition, and it’s true there were “some really posh people”. But there’s another side to it. “I love the philosophy: everyone is funny,” he says. His biggest epiphany was about the importance of tricks: “That’s a great thing to watch, to think something’s going one way then it moves in the other direction.” He also realised his performance was best when he approached comedy “with lightness”.
Frankie Monroe felt like the perfect character for these principles – he’d always been a trickster – and Kent-Walters started building an hour-long show, recruiting the director Jon Oldfield. “There was an interesting point developing the show where I was like: has it got to have a meaning?” He realised there was already deeper significance: lamenting the loss of clubs like The Misty Moon and the cultural life they held.
Back at the pub quiz, almost everyone has had points deducted for swot behaviour, and there have been appearances from excellent local comedians including Freddie Hayes and Molly McGuinness. Kent-Walters treats us to a new character, Vegas Dave, “a kind of Brits abroad guy; he runs a club in Magaluf” who gets the room singing. It’s a taste of Kent-Walters’s next live show: in 2025, Frankie will emerge from hell, with new friends. “I’ve got an image of a big gravestone, ‘RIP Frankie Monroe’, everyone’s coming in sombre, funeral vibes. Then he’s bursting out, digging himself out with the trowel.”
He hopes there could be a place for Frankie on TV – perhaps hosting a show like Alan Partridge or Mrs Merton. But he’s trying not to get swept up in post-awards hype, instead focusing on making new things. He’s just moved from Sheffield to Manchester – for love, and for its growing alternative comedy scene. “It’s an exciting place to be,” he says, “but there’s so much pressure to move to London. You second-guess yourself.”
Advice from mentor figure John Kearns helped. “He was like: ‘Have a good life.’ We’ve got this idea of the sad clown, but the reality is, if you’re having a better time, people want to watch you more,” he says. “I like to believe that if you’re just nice and you’re good at 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 tours the UK in 2025.