Avenue Q

This show is the funniest thing I've seen for ages! If you get the chance to go and see it at the Noel Coward Theatre in London, you must go. The boyfriend and I went to see it last week and had a fantastic time.

"Avenue Q" is like a warped version of "Sesame Street", where puppets and humans in a rundown New York neighbourhood share the traditional dilemmas of young adulthood. The agony of trying to work out your life's purpose is rendered into a hilarious series of songs and spoof educational animated films. The puppets face racism, commitment phobia, repressed homosexuality and all sorts of other issues. The most bizarre thing is that you actually come to care for them and identify with them as their lives get increasingly crap, yet you can't help but laugh an awful lot too.

The comedy is so sharp and funny because it has such a powerful element of truth about it. When a large, hairy monster starts singing that "The internet is really, really great... for porn," you know that he's singing what everyone is actually thinking. Actually, I found this particularly amusing as I've spent the past nine months researching whether or not the internet is really, really great... for creating a new kind of democratic public sphere through a fresh approach to news reporting. But really, deep down, I've always known that it's for porn. "Avenue Q" exploits to spectacular effect the fact that it's far easier to sing what can't be said out loud, particularly if you've got your hand up a puppet's bum when you're singing it. This is why songs such as "Everyone's a little bit racist", "If you were gay, that'd be okay" and "It sucks to be me" are so wittily effective, and surely destined to become classics.

The entire cast is extremely talented, not least because they weren't actually trained to use puppets before doing the show. So I guess they've had to learn a whole new form of expression, as well as getting rid of the notion that puppets are cute and cuddly children's playthings (something that the audience had well and truly done by the end of the two hour performance). For the most part the performers were young, too, and a lot were making their West End debuts, so maybe there was a bit of empathy there between them and their puppet characters. Who knows what the winning formula was, but it worked. The show is brilliant and it provides the perfect acerbic antedote to the schmaltzy, sugary overdose of niceness that invades entertainment of all kinds around Christmas time. It made me laugh. A lot. An awful lot.

The boyfriend has been telling everyone to go and see it because "It's great - it's got everything - even puppet sex!" Do you really need any more of an endorsement than that?