"Consent is not a big part of tickling, historically."Mount Pleasant—(February 18, 2026) Vancouver's very own Maddy Kelly, the now New York City-transplanted stand-up comedian, came back to town for another reliably sharp stage performance. Her latest set of jokes mostly delighted the familiar hometown crowd inside the Fox Cabaret music venue located at the nexus of Main Street and Kingsway as part of the city's annual eleven-day Just for Laughs Vancouver comedy festival.
Kelly, already fast-becoming a veteran of the North American touring comedy scene, continues to mine plenty of affable humour from her deceptively youthful appearance and ethnically ambiguous look. While the almost thirty-year-old is of mixed-race (Indian and Irish) heritage, her constantly being mistaken for a Latina or Hispanic teenager is a never-not-amusing constant source of easy jokes.
It was a fairly laid-back set with Kelly's musician boyfriend, Henry Hall, joining her as the opening act with a few inoffensive songs. Her recurring bit about them being in love, him proposing, and them hopefully getting married was another low-key but fun, night-long stinger. To close the night, the couple even appeared on stage together to banter about their meet-cute and long-distance romance to much delight despite her quickly remarking about lacking the on-stage chemistry she had hoped they had.
Alongside some intentionally off-putting or slightly counter-aggressive crowd work, humour about living in Tr*mp's America, and an inability to make any location-based one-liners, Kelly kept control of her audience with a relative ease and confrontational grace. Her random observations and polite DGAF attitude kept the audience, made up of her extended family, friends of family, cousins of cousins, and random tourists walking by the venue, amused amidst the deliberately controlled but drawn-out pauses in between hardy laughs.
Everything seems to be looking up for the successful comedy writer and occasional podcast host aside from her perpetual brokeness. From This Hour Has 22 Minutes to SubwayTakes to co-starring in humorous short films and comedy sketches, her ubiquity and variety of appearances only make her general comic persona all the more pleasantly enjoyable whenever and wherever she shows up.
Kelly's talent for casual comic delivery wrapped in a personable attitude and jovial persona continues to make her comedic presence so very amusing. Sadly, there was not much of a homecoming as the busy comedian had to jet off and catch a midnight red-eye flight back to NYC right after completing her headlining performance in order to ironically perform a corporate gig for Intuit QuickBooks, seriously.
JFL Vancouver 2026 runs until February 22nd, with comedians performing live shows at venues across the city.
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