Josh Pickar: Getting Off at Assembly Roxy Review
Law school. Death row. Clown school. It’s quite the CV, and Josh Pickar’s marketing really emphasised that final line, describing the show as an ‘absurd comedy’ - so much so that I arrived at the Snug braced for red noses and Gaulier-grade absurdism. What I got instead was something closer to a storytelling hour with jokes: a former US capital defence attorney recounting years spent arguing that the state shouldn’t kill his clients. The clown training is nowhere to be seen. Whether that’s a bait-and-switch or a pleasant surprise will depend on what you came for.
What’s not in dispute is Pickar himself. He is enormously easy company: effortlessly charismatic, earnest without being sanctimonious, and possessed with a compassion for his former clients. Humanising men on death row is delicate work, and Pickar does it with real care. He isn’t asking us to excuse anyone, just to notice that they’re people.
The comedy is patchier. The first half is genuinely funny, but somewhere past the midpoint the punchlines thin out and the hour tips into territory that is affecting, important, and only intermittently amusing. For a show sitting in the comedy listings, that’s a structural problem: the second half doesn’t build on the laughs of the first so much as quietly abandon them.
There’s a version of this show that commits fully to being the powerful piece of storytelling it clearly wants to be, and another that keeps the comic pressure up throughout. At the moment it’s caught between the two. The show feels like it’s still working out what it is. When it decides, it could be something special. For now, Getting Off is a worthwhile and fascinating hour from a man with a genuinely extraordinary story - it just doesn’t quite hit all the marks.
Josh Pickar: Getting Off runs at Assembly Roxy (Snug) until 30 August, 7:40pm.
★ ★ ★
Written by Ellora for Theatre and Tonic, August 2026.