Comedy
Veronica Lee
Ventriloquism, once a staple of music hall and variety theatre, has rather gone out of fashion. More mature readers - or students of the form - may be familiar with names such as Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Shari Lewis and Lambchop or Ray Alan and Lord Charles, but they are all decades gone from our stages and television screens. Nina Conti is now one of just a few vent acts to have a popular following, and she's reinventing the form.Her puppets owe more to the soft felt of The Muppets than to the woodworking skills of old, which means her props, while still in many ways caricatures, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Aware I was going to see a stand-up comedian at the Brighton Festival but not knowing much about Daniel Kitson, the opening of his new show, After The Beginning, Before The End, bemused. On he wandered, shaven bald of head, geeky, bearded, wearing specs and a librarian-style brown jacket. He sat in a nondescript red chair at a small table with a cup of tea and pressed buttons on an electronic gizmo which began to burble sweet abstract electro bleeps. Then he went into a monologue which ceased an hour and 40 minutes later. With a brief, humble goodbye he wandered off in much the same way he Read more ...
kate.bassett
Eddie Izzard is lining up his targets. He’s taking issue with dictatorial authority figures, with God, royals and priests, right-wingers and high-profile liars. These days, he doesn’t merely natter about the colour of his nail varnish, though that’s still in the mix. In his new solo show, Force Majeure - trumpeted as the most extensive comedy tour ever, taking him from Cardiff to Kathmandu - his transvestism is mentioned, but only en passant. His mixture of masculine/feminine attire is, likewise, understated: a traditional gent’s suit from Savile Row, with a just a glimpse of high heels. Read more ...
graeme.thomson
No theme, no message, no set, no title. Northern Irish comedian Jimeoin is a beguilingly old-fashioned kind of standup. “Just jokes,” he told us at the beginning of his new show, and he was true to his word. His gift lies in mining the quirks of everyday life for points of universal recognition, whether it’s the devilish business of refilling the ice tray, changing bin bags, bringing in the shopping, or why you’ll never see a busy man eating an ice cream.This observational path took some nicely surreal turns, such as when he graphically demonstrated why cowboys struggle with revolving doors, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The new South Bank Show has glided into its second season with a seemingly effortless profile of multi-hyphenate Tim Minchin. In case we’ve forgotten what exactly we admire him for these days – so varied has been his decade-long career been, through satire, rock, musical comedy, stage performance, to co-creator of the RSC transfer-spectacular Matilda that's now storming Broadway – then this was a good reminder.Self-deprecation may be one of his fortes (not that he doesn’t excel at deprecating others), but Minchin proved a thoughtful guide to his achievements to date, in that beguilingly Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Paul F Tompkins has been lauded by Rolling Stone magazine and the Huffington Post, both for his observational stand-up and his podcasts. But for someone praised for a very modern form of entertainment, he strikes a rather old-fashioned figure when he comes on stage. Three-piece suit, shiny tie, watch fob in his waistcoat pocket, big hair - it's like he's channelling the late, great Dave Allen.The mention of that superb Irish comic is no accident, for Tompkins is, like him, a wonderful raconteur. He too favours the long-form, shaggy-dog story that meanders around the subject with accents Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Is Steptoe and Son the platonic ideal of the British sitcom? Two men trapped in eternal stasis, imprisoned by class and bound together by family ties as if by hoops of steel, never to escape: it’s what half-hour comedy should be. Posterity would seem to agree, because since the sitcom ended in 1974 the two rag and bone men have never been out of work, appearing in the cinema, on stage and radio. For 30 years they made and reran the show on Swedish television, underpinning the widely held theory that Steptoe is but a step from Strindberg.Half a century after its creation, last summer Steptoe Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s a truism of the impersonator’s art that those who can do other voices have none of their own. On Parkinson, Peter Sellers couldn’t even come down the staircase as himself. When at the end of the show Mike Yarwood said, “And this is me!” a nation switched off. The idea behind The Mimic, starring the remarkable Terry Mynott, is that it accepts the truism as truth. This is a comedy about a man who can pose convincingly as Ronnie Corbett stuck in a postbox but has no life to call his own.Martin Hurdle – even his name sounds like a personality flaw - works in maintenance at a pharmaceutical Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Will Franken is an odd-bod. The American - Missouri-born, now a San Francisco resident - is a character comic and impressionist, but not in the way we understand a Rory Bremner or an Alistair McGowan. He “does” famous people, for sure, but these are fleeting impersonations in a wonderfully free-flowing affair that weaves swiftly between stories and builds an hour of increasingly absurdist humour.Appearing on the set of God's Property, Arinze Kene's play about racial tensions in 1982 south London, which is performed in the same space earlier in the evening, Franken does some material about Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There must be something about doing a medical degree. A steady stream of medics - including Jonathan Miller, Graham Chapman, Graeme Garden and Paul Sinha - have hung up their stethoscopes to plough a furrow in comedy (Phil Hammond, meanwhile, manages to combine the two careers). It was definitely medicine's loss and comedy's gain when Harry Hill made his career detour and, as he gleefully tells us in Sausage Time, five years at medical school provided him with the wherewithal to deliver an educated (and very funny) fart gag.Hill has been away from live performance for several years, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The sixth Altitude Festival takes place on March 18-22. The festival of Alpine comedy started in 2008 when Marcus Brigstocke decided to combine his day job with the family's snowboarding holiday and invited a few of his comedy mates to join him in performing in Méribel in France while skiing or snowboarding (some of them for the first time, which made for good comedy in itself). Latterly Andrew Maxwell has taken over producing the event, which has now moved across the Alps to Mayrhofen in Austria.Among the strong line-up this year are John Bishop, Phill Jupitus, Brendon Burns, Maxwell and Read more ...