August 15, 2026 at Pleasance Courtyard, Attic
Cult Classic is Hannah Platt’s sophomore hour, but she has the skill and presence of someone with far more experience. She commands the room easily, despite being small and self-described as awkward; you get the impression that she always knows exactly where everything is, exactly where she wants to go, and the best way to get there.
She reminded me of Li Jin Hao at times, the way her deceptively “small” persona was actually fully in control, and can switch on a dime from shy to intense. But the closest comparison that I saw was to someone like Ed Night: cynical and angry but quite dry about it, bitter but with a veneer of laughing it off, challenging the audience to take issue with her darker jokes, casually throwing away cleverly funny comments with a wave of her hand.
Comparisons come to my mind naturally because this is the first time I’ve seen Platt perform (though not the first time I’ve heard her material – her fantastic debut hour is available on Bandcamp and well recommended), but there is a lot about her presence, perspective, and writing style that’s entirely her own. The way she can turn a small laugh into a bigger one by commenting on it is hardly a new idea, but she finds a way of doing it that I’ve not seen before, switching between low and high status in a flash. She tackles the less palatable parts of her own consciousness, like jealousy and judgemental attitudes and irrational anger, and keeps the audience onside through charisma and very strong writing (and, probably, cultivating the type of audience who like getting material about the genuinely unsavoury parts of being a human).
Cult Classic has a general theme of, as the title suggests, cults. How they work, why people get drawn to them, why they might not be as bad as they’re made out to be. It also tackles childhood difficulties, queerness, therapy, mental health, nerdiness – all common topics for personal stand-up comedy, but Platt approaches them with a refreshing irreverence. She skewers the hypocrisies in her own industry brilliantly, and with some rug pulls that leave the audience falling apart with laughter.
There was a lot of frenzied laughter when I saw it, on a Saturday night with a crowd that was fully on board. The jokes are funny, and nearly every premise ends up somewhere unexpected. Cult Classic is a great chance to see an up-and-coming comedian who has the talent to achieve great success, if the comedy industry runs on any justice (which, according to the skewering it gets in this show, it doesn’t).
Dave Baillie