Daniel Foxx How Lovely review: A solidly entertaining hour
Daniel Foxx’s new comedy show How Lovely is touring the UK and Australia throughout 2026. (Matt Crockett)
Unfortunately for him but fortunately for his comedy career, Daniel Foxx went through “the biggest breakup of [his] life” in 2024. He is now one of the countless lovelorn millennials bobbing about in the trash-filled sea that is London’s dating pool, and he’s got a lot to say about it.
It’s this breakup which forms the basis of How Lovely, Foxx’s Eat Pray Love-esque UK and Australia tour which kick-started at London’s Soho Theatre last week, and will end at Walthamstow’s Soho Theatre in November. A romcom fanatic, Foxx didn’t quite get the quaint four-bedroom apartment in Bloomsbury he assumed he’d land when he moved to London, but he did, at least, get the guy: a tall, fit rugby lad, just his type, he tells us.
Yet after several years of sort of bliss, sort of reluctant mothering on Foxx’s part, the Julia Roberts meet-cute fantasy crumbled. As he suggests, nothing is as unsexy as performing oral sex on the person you’ve just had to parent, and so rugby lad upped and left. In true romcom fashion, the ex swiftly stumbled into an infinitely more nourishing relationship, while Foxx has been left gardening with grannies, polishing his Le Creuset, and swiping away the stream of Tinder bachelors whose only hobby is non-descript “travelling”.
Foxx delivers How Lovely’s hour-long set with endearing self-deprecation and confident elan as he documents the lows and lower-than-lows of being newly single. One anecdote sees him skewer himself for not being the tech savvy one in the relationship, leaving his home virtual assistant free to torment him over his ex leaving. Another zinger compares those who managed to get into relationships pre-Covid with the 1975 Fall of Saigon.
Foxx is an upbeat and engaging storyteller. Yet with the bulk of the show focussing on his break up, it doesn’t feel blazingly original. A bit about air fryers feels passé in 2026, and you could lob a stone down a street in Soho and whack three comedians who’ve told jokes about the scourge of London’s dating scene that evening.
Online, Foxx is known for slightly more mordant humour, such as sketches about waiting for an old billionaire lover to die. How Lovely’s highlight arrives in a similarly spicy sequence about the unabashed smut that has overtaken the fantasy romance genre in books, and why the authors of such material have been given the right to vote. A self-jab about being targeted by homophobic – but sadly quite funny – 13-year-old trolls is executed perfectly. Departing from his lost love and dating disasters gives his routine room to breath, but if he plans on sticking to such well-trodden ground, he could probably push things further over the line.
While belly laughs are a little light, chuckles are consistent all the way through, and How Lovely is a solidly entertaining hour helmed by joyous company.
Daniel Foxx: How Lovely is touring the UK and Australia until November. Tickets available now.
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