Laugh Hard Comedy Club returns to the Plaza Cinema for Christmas

Laugh Hard Comedy Club is coming back to the Plaza Cinema in Waterloo for its first ever Christmas live show.

Comedian Andy Roach has put together a line-up of stand-ups from across the country to join him for a night of laughs at the historic venue for Laugh Hard Comedy Club on Friday December 8.

It’ll be only the second comedy night at the Plaza for Andy who also runs a monthly night at Rock Salt bar in Crosby.

He says after the success of the first one, back in June 2022, he’s been waiting for the right free date in the cinema’s calendar and availability of comedians to do it again.

“I wanted a mix of people and I’m obviously always working on the circuit, so I see a lot of acts,” he explains. “Then it’s just a question of asking and hoping they’ve got a gap to do it.

“For this one we’ve got Tez Ilyas, who’s been on Live at the Apollo and had his own show on C4, and Gbemi Oladipo who I’ve gigged with a couple of times. He’s hilarious, and he was already doing gigs in the North West that weekend so we were able to get this one in.

“Katie Tracey’s a great local act, she’s done Hot Water a lot in Liverpool, and Jordan Ducharme is a Manchester-based Canadian and I’ve had him at every venue I’ve done shows in. People always want to see him again and he didn’t do the first one at the Plaza so it was always in my mind to have him for the second if he could.

“I basically get acts on that I personally like, and I try to have a variety of styles in there because at the end of the day I’m a comedy fan as well as a comedian.”

With December nights out and all the Christmas parties on, this one’s perfecting timing for Laugh Hard Comedy’s night.

And, says Andy, it might seem like an unusual venue for live comedy, but it actually works really well.

“We do our show in the main screen 1, where the capacity’s just over 200. We keep it to just the stalls, we don’t use the balcony even though we could sell more tickets, because I think it would become a different type of show then and we don’t want people to feel removed from what’s happening on stage.

“The Plaza is just a really nice building to do it in for a lot of reasons – it’s got a lot of history to it, it’s a community-run place so if the night does well it helps the cinema keep going as well and it helps us to get the word out to a wider audience about our monthly one at Rock Salt.

“Comedy is also the kind of thing the Plaza was built for back in the day, it was a variety entertainment venue, and it had comedians like Arthur Askey on so we’re actually taking it back to what it was originally designed for.”