Comedy
Veronica Lee
Zoë Coombs Marr, Underbelly Cowgate ★★★Zoë Coombs Marr's debut show last year, Dave, gained a lot of attention, and rightly so. Dave is an old-school male comic whose line in misogyny doesn't sit well in modern comedy – even if his material might find an audience in the wider world.For this year's show, Trigger Warning, which won the Barry Award at the Melbourne Comedy Festival in April, Coombs Marr has broadened out the gag, here placing Dave in a situation in which he is hilariously out of place. To combat his critics, he tells us, he has stopped delivering any gags at all and will perform Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Richard Gadd, The Banshee Labyrinth ★★★★★Richard Gadd wryly tells us at the end of Monkey See Monkey Do that he thought it was a good idea to put this thought-provoking show, with its deep seam of theatricality and emotion, in the comedy section of the Fringe brochure. And in truth it could sit easily as a theatre show, albeit one with frequent laughs. But at its heart is a deeply personal and highly revelatory story about an incident in Gadd's life that caused him to re-evaluate who he is both as a person and as a man.It starts amiably enough with a Trainspotting-esque chase through streets Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Bridget Christie, The Stand ★★★★★When Bridget Christie planned this show, it was to be a work in progress about mortality for a tour starting later this year. But then the EU referendum happened, and everything changed. Within the space of a few weeks, she had written this heartfelt polemic about Brexit, and it's an astonishingly accomplished and moving work.She tells us that, with so many bad things happening in the world at the moment, she's going to do a nice, upbeat show about gardening, her new passion in life now that she is allowed to like the pursuit because she is past 40. She is Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, and has been for the past 42 years, ever since Garrison Keillor first reported on the town's goings-on in his weekly radio show A Prairie Home Companion. Keillor's purring baritone is the gentle voice of non-coastal America, and it is picked up by 700 local public radio stations by four million listeners. But at 72, and after a health scare, Keillor is stepping down. So anyone who wants to get a regular fix from Lake Wobegon will need to go back to the books.Keillor's first fame as a writer was as a regular contributor to William Shawn's The New Yorker Read more ...
Veronica Lee
At least half the audience for this live version of the short-form improv show, which was shown on Channel 4 between 1989 and 1998, couldn’t possibly have seen Whose Line Is It Anyway? when it was first broadcast, so one assumes they must have become fans via YouTube or rerun channels – testimony to the idea that good comedy is timeless and ageless.The West End version of Dan Patterson and Mark Leveson's creation is an appealing melding of old and new. The acerbic and quick-witted Clive Anderson is back as master of ceremonies, and producers maximise his presence by giving him a 15- Read more ...
Veronica Lee
David Baddiel's new show, funny though much of it is, raises some interesting ethical questions. Described by the writer and comic as a “massively disrespectful celebration” of his parents' lives, My Family: Not the Sitcom certainly lives up to that, but, considering his mother is dead and his father is suffering from a form of dementia, neither could give their approval for the material used. Yet because it is done with such obvious affection, that becomes a nagging doubt rather than a burning issue during the engrossing 110 minutes.Baddiel's starting point is that, at his mother's funeral, Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The last time I saw Alexei Sayle was at a benefit gig in Essex in the Eighties, when his rapid torrents of invective and surreal invention was stand-up as great as I’ve seen. Last night’s stage interview about his memoir, Thatcher Stole My Trousers, was reminiscent of those times rather than comparable.The format means Sayle the performer is half switched on – "Alexei Sayle", the tight-suited, aggressive character the former art student describes creating, only occasionally twitching to life beneath the more “genial” reality he says was always present. The Sayle whose sacred cow radar made Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Truly, the older Julian Clary gets the filthier he becomes. As he warns us in almost the first line of The Joy of Mincing, which celebrates 30 years in the business, “Are you ready for filth?”He isn’t mis-selling, and the audience at the Congress Theatre in Eastbourne, where I saw the show, loved every naughty minute of it. The combination of the British seaside and ultra-camp comedy from this “renowned homosexual” was a winning one. The two-hour show is less a stand-up routine, more a string of anecdotes – about taking MDMA (twice) by accident, life in the country with his partner Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's striking what a broken heart can do for a comic. Not least it can provide him with some new material, but also make him take a step back to reevaluate what he has. In Marcus Brigstocke's case it led him into a horrible depression but happily, via some other byways, to this new show, Why the Long Face?, which started life at the Edinburgh Fringe last year.It touches only tangentially on depression, but for longstanding Brigstocke fans the mention of it and the failed love affair (after Brigstocke's wife divorced him) explains this change of direction for a comic whose mainstay has been Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Victoria Wood was a very private national treasure. Not for her the tawdry catwalk of Twitter nor the klaxon of the confessional memoir. She wasn't comfortable talking to journalists and when she found one whom she could just about trust, she stuck with them. That is how I found myself interviewing her many times over the years, and came to see past the carapace of jollity that was her performance persona. The first time I met her was, weirdly, for a supermarket magazine. She could barely believe it herself, having endured quite severe food issues over many years. Inevitably those came Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Alexei Sayle (b 1952) first came to fame at the birth of alternative comedy, as MC at the Comedy Store in London at the dawn of the 1980s. He cemented his reputation via his recurring role in the anarchic student sitcom classic The Young Ones, as well as appearances in a number of Comic Strip Presents… films. He has written and fronted a host of sketch shows, including the Emmy Award-winning Alexei Sayle’s Stuff.Sayle retired from stand-up for a decade and a half but returned to the stage in 2011 and has since successfully toured new material. He has had a sporadic career in film, radio and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
“It's a really bad word,” Jena Friedman says as she opens her show, American C*nt. “...American.” And so begins an evening of ultra-dry, drawled-out and darkly feminist wit that encompasses everything from recent atrocities in Belgium and Donald Trump to abortion and Hamas.Friedman, as befits someone who has written for, among others, The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and David Letterman, can write a sparkling line, and is not short of opinions or the self-possession to deliver them unapologetically. The show's segment on abortion – “the abortion portion” – takes no prisoners. She suggests Read more ...