Reviewer: Annabel Bruce
Chief Petty Officer by Vix Leyton is an hour-long free comedy show dedicated to some of the most infamous acts of pettiness, from historic grudges to disputes that have played out much more recently. Wagatha Christie, Count Binface, the Colin the Caterpillar battle between M&S and Aldi, Ea Nasir, pothole birthdays and Stewart Semple vs Anish Kapoor all make an appearance, alongside plenty of other examples.
At times, Leyton delivers the whole thing like an academic lecture, complete with a presentation and her “Hill To Die On Index”. The graph measures each petty act by joy on the Y axis and commitment on the X axis, helping Leyton decide which examples of pettiness are actually worth the effort. In her eyes, the ideal petty act gets plenty of attention and satisfaction without requiring a ridiculous amount of work to pull off.
It’s a format that works well throughout the hour. Leyton repeatedly returns to the graph to give her verdict before moving onto the next story, which gives the show an easy structure without making it feel too rigid. There’s also something very funny about watching completely ridiculous disputes being assessed with the seriousness of an academic presentation, particularly when Leyton starts adding her own observations and jokes.
There’s a good mixture of stories too. Some will be immediately familiar because they dominated headlines at the time, while others are much more obscure or come from further back in history. It means you’re never sitting through an hour of stories you’ve already heard before.
Leyton’s enthusiasm for the subject is probably what makes the concept work as well as it does. She isn’t just running through examples of people being petty; she gets into why people become so committed to these disputes and, importantly, whether the payoff was actually worth it. Some victims fight back, some acts of revenge turn out to be nowhere near as satisfying as intended, and others require so much effort that you start questioning who really won. Leyton happily picks them all apart.
The mix of storytelling, slides and completely unnecessary levels of analysis gives Chief Petty Officer its own identity beyond the funny subject matter. Better still, the show eventually reveals itself to be a petty act in its own right, with Leyton saving that particular story until the end.
It’s a clever way to finish an unusual and very enjoyable hour of comedy, while proving perhaps the most important lesson of all: sometimes being petty isn’t really about winning. Sometimes it’s about committing to something long after any reasonable person would have let it go.
★★★★ 4/5
