comedians
Matthew Wright
As the Brockman family returns for a fifth and final series of Outnumbered, some viewers will find their hackles standing to attention at the family's extraordinary distillation of middle-class characterstics. There’s the enviable middle-class London home they live in, absurdly beyond the means of a family that seems to subsist on a single teacher’s income. There’s the tameness of their problems, this week's revolving around angst-ridden secondary school choice and the horror provoked by the eldest child Jake's (Tyger Drew-Honey) tattoo. And there's the mother’s relentless anxiety about Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer's fans recall with huge affection their previous collaborations – among them Big Night Out and The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer, two wonderfully anarchic shows. Now comes their first traditional, one-room (well two actually) sitcom House of Fools, which, true to form, is a mix of physical comedy, bawdy humour, surreal sight gags and utter nonsense.As in another project, Shooting Stars, Bob (Mortimer) is the straight man, who has his house constantly invaded by a succession of eejits – chief among them his lodger Vic (Reeves), a lothario friend and neighbour (Matt Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Lest anyone think that the measured performances in Borgen, The Bridge and The Killing or the personal cinema of, say, Susanne Bier, Pernille Fischer Christensen, Lars von Trier or Thomas Vinterberg define Danish drama, along comes the British release of Klown, a film which – despite a few local touches – plays to the familiar: the uncomfortable comedy of The Office and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and the gross-out, road-trip fare of The Hangover.Like the first The Hangover film, Klown hinges on an arrested-development male presented with a scenario where he ought to commit to his girlfriend. He Read more ...
David Nice
Three cheers for good old Albert, natural laugh-out-loud heir of Verdi’s Falstaff and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, and the best possible way to mark creator Britten’s being one hundred years and one day old. Youth has its day in both those earlier masterpieces, but the lovers are subordinate to the middle-aged comic protagonists. Here they're the equals of a hero who is no scamster but a shy grocer’s boy who busts out drinking and worse to loosen the apron strings of a prim community. He may have had his funniest incarnation yet last night in young Andrew Staples' characterisation, very much at Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Mancunian Jason Manford is the kind of chap it would be difficult to dislike. Laidback, casually dressed, smiley and interacting with his audience in a totally unthreatening manner - it's no wonder that that demeanour, coupled with his everyman observational comedy, has made him a star.He comes on stage to tell us there's no support act. “I'm not paying someone 60 quid to be slightly shitter than me,” he says. And then he deadpans: “I can do that.” He's joking, of course, as he's not shit at all, but rather an accomplished entertainer.When he talks about something he's genuinely moved by, we Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The last time we saw soldiers going over the top at the Somme with comic baggage attached was the tragic finale of Blackadder. It’s the inevitable comparison that The Wipers Times writers Ian Hislop and Nick Newman were going to face, and though they aim for something different in what is, after all, a true story, there’s no escaping the same absurdity of clipped understatement that they have given their British officer heroes, or the essential one-dimensional nature of characterisation. Even fleshed out with free-standing cabaret-style sketches, at 90 minutes this sometimes felt as long as Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Boldly not going anywhere near things like Grange Hill or Teachers, Big School is more like a throwback to the St Trinian's of the 1950s. Co-writer and star David Walliams plays a man known only as Mr Church, Deputy Head of Chemistry at Greybridge School (the nod to Billy Bunter's Greyfriars presumably being the whole point). He's repressed, uptight and sexually inept, and more than a tiny bit reminiscent of Rowan Atkinson playing the title role in Simon Gray's Quartermaine's Terms.A few grudging scraps have been thrown to the prevailing -isms of 21st century education, like a pupil Read more ...
Veronica Lee
John Lloyd, Underbelly Bristo Square **** John Lloyd is a comedy god to any aficionado of the art form. He has written or produced some of the best radio and television comedy of the past 40 years, including (and these are just brief highlights) Just a Minute, The News Quiz, Not the Nine O'Clock News, Spitting Image, Blackadder and QI. He was with the Cambridge Footlights but hasn't performed live for more than 30 years, yet in Liff of QI you wouldn't know it – he's a naturally gifted raconteur.Standing behind a lectern, he delivers a sort-of lecture, which is a very funny collection of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Carey Marx, Gilded Balloon **** Carey Marx couldn't come to the Fringe last year, because of the small matter of having a heart attack. But, looking on the bright side, the experience has given him his new show, Intensive Carey, in which the comic tells his story without a trace of self-pity and with a keen sense of the absurd.He's wonderfully honest about the lifestyle that led to the illness – during which we learn another use for a pair of socks when staying in hotel rooms – and the effects the procedures and medications may have had on his sex life (although he managed to masturbate Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Christopher Guest and his group of players have been responsible for some of the funniest, driest comedy films of the past 30 years, including Waiting For Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind and, of course, his masterpiece This Is Spinal Tap, in which he played the tight-trousered guitarist Nigel Tufnel. Now he's directed and co-created (with Jim Piddock) Family Tree, a US-British sitcom first shown on HBO in America.Like most of Guest's work, the mockumentary sitcom is improvised by the cast and it centres on Irish actor Chris O'Dowd's Tom Chadwick, a 30-year-old unemployed claims assessor Read more ...
Heather Neill
The celebrated 1955 Ealing comedy starring Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers and Herbert Lom was apparently intended as a cartoonish satire of post-war British decline. In 2013, with the Empire long gone and the country struggling in a new age of austerity, what is there to do when contemplating "the state of the nation" but laugh hysterically?Graham Linehan (writer of Father Ted and The IT Crowd) is the right man for the job, bringing The Ladykillers to the stage with a hefty dollop of lunacy and some spectacular physical comedy, some of it based in music-hall tradition: the Vaudeville Theatre ( Read more ...
James Williams
Equal parts prodigiously talented musician, consistently funny comedian, auteur, theatre performer, free thinker and writer, Reggie Watts is nigh on impossible to pigeonhole. He is a hurricane of furious creativity operating completely in his own lane, hurtling full-speed towards Parts Unknown. Primarily known for his inimitable blend of improvisational music and comedy, each show he performs is completely original, never to be repeated.Utilizing a looping effects pedal and keyboard (and very little else) Watts creates on-the-fly songs in a variety of sublimely lampooned musical styles, Read more ...