Brick Wall Comedy

Lion King Summons, Hockey Sticks and Apollo 13

Published October 07, 2026

Lion King Summons, Hockey Sticks and Apollo 13

A comic gets sued mid-set over a Lion King joke, a rat meets a hockey stick, and a clown explains the lunar module on tiptoe.

Getting Served Is Now Part of the Act

A $27 million defamation lawsuit was handed to Learnmore Jonasi in the middle of his own club set, by a process server who walked onstage under the lights. Legal papers usually turn up somewhere quieter. Jonasi is a Zimbabwean comic who broke through as an America’s Got Talent finalist, and the lawsuit comes from Lebohang ‘Lebo M’ Morake, the South African composer behind the Zulu chant that opens Disney’s The Lion King.

The joke at the centre of it is very short. The chant begins “Nants’ingonyama bagithi Baba.” It is sung as though the sun itself is rising, which in the film it is. On a podcast, Jonasi offered a plain English version: “Look, there’s a lion. Oh my God.” That is the whole bit. The grandeur of the music meets the most literal possible description of what is on screen, and the gap between them is the laugh. The line went viral, and Lebo M sued.

Then the summons arrived mid-show, and Jonasi did the only professional thing available. He laughed at the papers, read them aloud and used the server as a straight man. The crowd assumed the server was a prop and the whole thing was planned. So the room got a better bit than the one that started the trouble, and Jonasi now has a $27 million legal problem that his own audiences think is part of the act.

Forty-Seven Minutes and a Hockey Stick

Sam Morril has released Incorrect, his third major standup special, and it runs 47 minutes. Morril, a New York club veteran and co-host of the We Might Be Drunk podcast, filmed it in Tampa, Florida, and directed it himself.

A lot of modern streaming specials build long, sentimental stories into the set. Morril skips that. He stands at the mic and does setups and punchlines, with no theatrical staging, which is roughly how he works in clubs.

The riskiest stretch is about the Anne Frank House. Morril reads its TripAdvisor reviews, and he filters them by “three stars and below,” because that is where he finds what he considers the most authentic human reactions to tragedy. They are also, in a word, incorrect, which happens to be the name of the special. The joke works because the filter sounds like such a sensible consumer habit, applied to the one place it should never be applied.

The other big bit is a rat in his Greenwich Village apartment. The regular exterminators fail, and they praise the rat’s intelligence, which is not what you want from an exterminator. So he hires an unorthodox crew who turn up with hockey sticks and beat the rat to death. Minutes later they text him a photo, captioned “I made him like this.”

The crowd roars and applauds at that text. It is one line at the end of a story about pest control, and it lands without any sentimental build-up to lean on. That is the whole argument for Morril’s 47 minutes.

A Nervous Breakdown With Flight Data

The SoHo Playhouse is hosting Elf Lyons’s New York stage debut, The Woman on the Edge, after an acclaimed Edinburgh Fringe run. Lyons is a British clown trained at École Philippe Gaulier, best known for multi-genre physical shows like Horses. Here she plays a woman dumped over WhatsApp, covered in body glitter, wobbling on tiptoe in a cocktail dress.

The fragile heroine on the verge of collapse is an old stage and screen type. Lyons explained her problem with it in a Vulture feature: “In old dramas and films, there’s always this woman who is on the verge of a nervous breakdown and she can’t do anything,” she said. “I hate that stereotype of a woman who’s not capable.”

So the woman falling apart turns out to know a lot about spacecraft. Still drifting around on her toes in sparkles, Lyons delivers a precise lecture on Apollo 13, listing the command, lunar and service modules and the maths Mission Control used to bring the crew home. The body says helpless. The information says she could run the mission.

The second bit is riskier. Every night she brings a man up from the audience, hands him a scripted monologue and lip-syncs along while he reads it. A woman miming to a man’s voice is the point about who gets to talk. One volunteer went off-script to ham it up, and Lyons stopped the show to tell him off, which made the point better than the script did.

It is a show that needs a man to misbehave and then has to deal with it when one does. Lyons has built it so that either outcome works, and for a New York debut that is a strong position to be in.

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