Comedy
theartsdesk
The Arts Desk, or theartsdesk.com, is a website created in 2009 by leading British professional arts journalists and critics to offset the decline in supply of arts coverage in the print media where most of them worked. Launched on 9 September 2009, it publishes daily updating reviews, interviews and features by its member writers that aim to combine the best of print journalism standards with the speed, accessibility and technical opportunities of the web.Its particular strengths are overnight reviews of live plays, concerts and dance, in-depth Q&As with leading arts figures, weekly Read more ...
ash.smyth
From Edinburgh to London and back, via Tatooine and Port Talbot, Rich Hardcastle has photographed playwrights and magicians, burlesque dancers and rugby captains, and regularly adorned the covers of The Big Issue, FHM and The Sunday Times Culture section. Along the way, though, the 40-year-old Londoner has missed no opportunity to shoot the great and the good-humoured, has documented Karl Pilkington’s idiocy abroad, and has produced the pictures for the illustrated book of Extras. Photographing funny faces, it turns out, is something of a specialism – and this month, his portrait of Rob Read more ...
howard.male
From the long shot of the suburban London semis onwards, I couldn’t help but think of the 1960s BBC sitcom Not in Front of the Children which similarly focused on a middle-class couple with three children. There’s no laughter track on Outnumbered but there’s also no escaping the fact that - apart from a colourful new range of insults the kids casually fire at each other (“numb-chuck”, “toss-piece”) - this could easily be one of Wendy Craig’s naughty but nice TV families, bickering over breakfast and complaining about the burnt fish fingers. Oh and look, there’s John Sessions playing the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The winners of the 2011 Foster's Edinburgh Comedy Awards have been announced. The main award, worth £10,000, went to Adam Riches for his anarchic and intensely physical show Bring Me the Head of Adam Riches; the best newcomer award, worth £5,000, went to Humphrey Ker for Dymack Watson: Nazi Smasher!, a tall tale woven from his grandfather's real-life wartime exploits as an intelligence officer sent behind enemy lines.
The special panel award, also worth £5,000, went to The Wrestling, a one-off event during which 20 comics engaged in wrestling bouts with professional wrestlers.
Adam Riches: Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's typically intelligent and insightful stuff from the Irishman, who describes himself simply as a clown - but he's a clown with the requisite political knowledge and understanding of the human condition to make some pretty astute observations about how we are today. And despite his world view being basically lefty and libertarian at the same time, he's also self-aware enough to acknowledge his comfortable middle-class existence. When demonstrators were threatening to force their way into the Ritz Hotel in London in a recent protest, Maxwell's feelings were conflicted between thinking they Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Last year, Josie Long, famous for her whimsical comedy and fey delivery, decided to get serious. Disheartened by the election result, she started to do political comedy, but sadly her level of analysis was along the lines of: “Anyone who voted Tory in May's election is a fucking cunt.” One year on in The Future is Another Place, the level hasn't been raised.It speaks volumes that someone who broadly shares my politics can be so irritating, but suggesting that royalists dying is worth a whoop is just plain mean. Her suggestion that if, were the 95 per cent tax rate to be brought back, the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Chris Ramsey, Pleasance Courtyard ****It's easy to see why the Edinburgh Comedy Awards panel shortlisted South Shields comic Chris Ramsey. He's personable, very funny, has a well-constructed show - and is destined for a big television career any day soon. He used to allow the incorrect description of him as Geordie pass, he says, because he couldn't be bothered to explain the difference between Geordies, Makems and his own tribe, Sand Siders, until the television series Geordie Shore came along – and there was no way this working-class lad made good was going to be associated with that Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Sam Simmons, Gilded Balloon **** Sam Simmons clocks a young girl in the front row and stops the show. “How old are you?” the Aussie comic asks. “Ten,” comes the reply, and he suggests to her mother that this may not be the show for them, so they leave. And just in good time, as what follows is a load of cock and balls as Simmons is dressed in vest and pants which, after he is drenched during a gag, become increasingly, er, figure-hugging.Sam Simmons clocks a young girl in the front row and stops the show. “How old are you?” the Aussie comic asks. “Ten,” comes the reply, and he suggests Read more ...
theartsdesk
If the cards had fallen differently Luke Haines might have been as big as Blur. As frontman of The Auteurs he was briefly tipped for Britpop greatness, so it is no surprise that he likes the idea of alternative histories. This special show, The North Sea Scrolls, was all about them, as Haines, former Microdisney linchpin Cathal Coughlan, writer Andrew Mueller and cellist Audrey Riley mixed spoken word with punchy lo-fi melodies.According to this bizarro version of the past, narrated by Mueller while Coughlan and Haines shared vocals, record producer Joe Meek was once minister of culture, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Kieran and the Joes are a three-man sketch group (Kieran Hodgson, Joe Markham and Joe Parham, working with co-writer Tom Meltzer) who are young, personable and very neatly dressed in shirts and ties - but while they may appear clean-cut their comedy veers nicely towards the dark.In Teampowered the audience are the attendees at a teamworking seminar. You know where this is going to end up, as the trio will of course fall out and the team is destroyed by ego and stupidity, but how they get there has some neat touches, such as getting the audience to practise proposing to the Read more ...
theartsdesk
From the moment Adam Riches bursts onto the stage, spewing his business cards around as a manic showbiz agent who wants to sign up everyone and everything - including even the venue's walls and floor - this is a show of hyper energy and absurdist comedy.The character comic does a quick costume change to become Pedro, a Spanish Swingball champion, and what follows is a version of the game the manufacturers never dreamed of, a waterfight and all sorts of mayhem. There’s a lot of audience participation, but anybody pulled up on stage is enjoying themselves thoroughly; at times there's such Read more ...