More people than they would like to admit feel a flicker of excitement at the word PowerPoint. Few elements of office life have been resurrected for entertainment purposes so enthusiastically: fringe shows, TikTok trends, even full-blown PowerPoint parties. With ta-da! Josh Sharp makes the most of this format while stripping it to its bare bones — mostly blank white slides with black letters, which are often beautifully arranged as minimalist images that give the illusion of detail. There are 2,000 of them over seventy-five minutes.
According to Sharp, this is theater theatre, not just stand-up, which he calls “bullshit” — especially considering the extra effort involved: he has chained himself to 2,000 cues. But bullshit feels like a deliberately harsh way of simply describing illusion. His jokes work like mathematical formulas or magic tricks, twisting spelling, punctuation and capitalisation — setting what’s on screen against what he says aloud. He is a master of irony and layers.
There are so many bad pronoun jokes about at the moment, but one of the favourite moments here is an observation that as we age, our gender becomes less visible: we become less of a he or a she or a they, and more of a that. Sharp delights in the hidden implications of seemingly unassuming words, finding punchlines in their grammatical structure — a kind of verbal trickery that has you laughing at jokes built almost entirely from language itself. It’s good bullshit.
He paces the evening expertly. Repetition forms the beating heart of the show, and live, the rhythm he creates consistently triggers laughter. He begins with punchy, word-based, quick-fire jokes, then moves into more complex narrative work surrounding his mother’s death and his own near-death experience — just as we begin to run out of energy for so much laughter. From there, he shifts again, into a more intellectual section about Schrödinger’s cat. There are also clear threads throughout. “Time <—> is a line, that’s how it works,” he says — a simple thought that is not really simple at all. We know this because he has played with it so thoroughly, fooling us again and again.
Some of the humour here is quite blue, with a considerable focus on cum, much of it tied to his coming-out experience and his unbridled gallop into the New York gay scene after years of suppressing his sexuality in the South. Yet it is so rigorously shaped by an understanding of joke structure and language that it never feels like smut for its own sake or shock for shock’s sake.
It’s not often you get a show that is so much fun in the moment and then so interesting to talk about afterwards, but this is that. The techno music before the show starts sets us up for a party, and then we are suddenly in philosophy, maths, grammar, science, grief, sexuality — and it is still a party. In terms of charisma, Sharp is a superstar. This especially comes through in a viral video of him watching Adele in concert with his dad: his dad belting along is endearing, but Sharp’s whooping beside him is hilarious. His energy feels boundless. He is an artist — and he is not afraid to tell us so.
The show finishes with a trick-trick: he deliberately messes up a pick-a-card routine, and the final slides of the show turn out to be part of the deck itself. It is a strangely moving ending, one that means everything and nothing. Was the point of the show that we can read one thing and hear another? That time is a line? That Sharp is gay? Why do these shows have to end on a point at all? By refusing to pick one clear meaning, is he once again skewering the “industry-standard” expectation? It feels like another trick. It takes a sharp thinker to be so cheeky.
Ta-da! is an instant recommendation. You leave the theatre completely satisfied: you’ve laughed, you’ve thought, you’ve felt. Sharp keeps you fully in the moment while you’re there, and thinking about it long after you’ve left.
Written by: Josh Sharp
Published with the Reviews Hub
Rosie Wood 
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