standup comedy
Veronica Lee
There's a story in James Acaster's superb new show at the Phoenix Theatre which hangs on him being the first UK comic to shoot several Netflix specials. He doesn't tells us this to boast; far from it. It's to set up another long-form gag, one of several lengthy and interconnected stories he tells in Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999, the two-part tale of the best and worst years of his life.Previous shows by Acaster – for which he has received five nominations at the prestigious Edinburgh Comedy Awards – have been surreal inventions, with few personal references (or at least those you could Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Suited and booted, Tom Allen and Suzi Ruffell presented this gala preview to the Leicester Comedy Festival, which is now in its 26th year and starts next month. The comics, who do an occasional podcast together called Like Minded, make an engaging double act – although their solo shows couldn't be more different.Ruffell is loud, energetic and talks a mile a minute. Allen is urbane, laidback and slyly caustic. But in matching DJs they teamed up for presenting duties and showed why the podcast is so successful; they bounce off each other brilliantly and nattered away like an old couple between Read more ...
Veronica Lee
As openings go, the first night of Hari Kondabolu's standup residency at Soho Theatre was pretty memorable, so get to American Hour in good time as he is trying to pull off the same trick when he can (no spoilers, but it involves quite a bit of planning for each performance, so he may not). It's a clever spoof on the “all Asians look the same to me” trope so beloved of white racists.Racism is something Kondabolu, a chatty and assured American whose parents emigrated from south India to the United States, knows about, and he starts with a riff on how people (mis)pronounce his name is so Read more ...
Veronica Lee
You might think that, given the upheaval we are living through, political comics would be 10 a penny but, surprisingly, they’re thin on the ground. Regardless of how any rivals he has, though, Matt Forde is surely the outstanding political comic working today.Brexit Through the Gift Shop is his latest state-of-the-nation show and, despite his previous career as a Labour Party adviser and his avowed Blairite, pro-EU views, it’s one that anybody who is remotely politically engaged can enjoy, not least for Forde’s breadth of knowledge and the way he distils the complexities of modern politics Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Anyone who has seen a previous Dave Gorman show or his television series Modern Life Is Goodish knows what to expect: a show that's part lecture, part conversation, all pedantry, done with the aid of a PowerPoint presentation – clicker, laptop and onstage big screen as important as the patter, the text on screen often providing an addendum gag to the one he has already told, or increasing our anticipation of a payoff yet to come.Which is not to say that his latest show, With Great PowerPoint Comes Great ResponsibilityPoint, is more of the same-old. Yes, there's more of his forensically Read more ...
Veronica Lee
As a former adviser to Harriet Harman and Ed Miliband – and a woman who has put her name forward to be a Labour Party candidate at a Westminster election – Ayesha Hazarika certainly knows her politics from the inside. So a show with the title Girl on Girl: The Fight For Feminism promises to be avowedly political.For the first half, this proves to be the case, with an intelligent resumé of the past year since the Harvey Weinstein allegations (which he denies) and the start of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, from which she manages to mine a lot of sardonic humour. But then in the second half Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Considering where Motion Sickness ends up, Ivo Graham's new show begins a million miles away, as he talks about his love of trains and his favourite train company, Chiltern – or “The Chilt”. But don't be fooled by this quotidian fare; what begins as a seemingly aimless wander down a path of nothing very much packs an emotional punch by the end of the hour.Graham has previously made much gentle humour out of his thoroughly English, middle-class existence. His USP (not quite so unique, but we'll let that pass) is that he was Eton and Oxford, rather clever but witty and self-deprecating enough Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Blimey, Nish Kumar is angry. Angry about Donald Trump, angry about misogyny, angry about racism, angry about Brexit – angry about a lot of things. But before anyone could dismiss It's In Your Nature to Destroy Yourselves as a checklist of woke priorities for the liberal metropolitan elite, he turns the joke against himself – it shows how upside down the world is, he says, that a 33-year-old comic whose favourite food is dips has become a spokesman for the politically engaged.As anyone who has seen Kumar fronting The Mash Report – a comedy take on the week's news – will know, Brexit really Read more ...
Veronica Lee
As we enter the venue, Rose Matafeo is playing a game of mini table tennis with a member of the audience. Nothing that follows seems to relate to this “just a bit of fun to start the show” – but, trust me, it's one of the cleverest bits of misdirection you will ever see. The penny drops only at the end of Horndog, for which the New Zealander deservedly won the prestigious Edinburgh Comedy Award for best show at the Fringe at the weekend.It's a high-energy hour, as Matafeo gallops through heaps of gag-laden material in a show that she says more than once is just about having fun, but which Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Rosie Jones ★★★★There are two versions of Rosie Jones, she tells us; one nice, one not so nice. And who knows which of those would have won the battle of psyches if the comic had not been deprived of oxygen for a quarter of an hour during birth, she asks in Fifteen Minutes. It's a terrific device – subtle but pointed, witty but poignant – as she muses about what kind of person she might have been without cerebral palsy.Jones is a mischievous woman and likes subverting people's expectations, manipulating the audience into uncomfortable moments, and then relieving the tension with a killer pay- Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ari Shaffir ★★★★★There are some super-talented US comics at the Fringe this year, and Ari Shaffir is among them. The edgy, no-holds-barred New Yorker lays it out there with his show title, Jew, in which he charts why he has left his Orthodox upbringing behind. It started by asking questions of his rabbis – and two years at a yeshiva (a school that focuses on the study of the Talmud and the Torah) in Israel gave him the ammunition, but perhaps not in the way his teachers had intended.As you might expect of a dry-witted comic, the questions were not of the existential variety but rather ones Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Les Dennis was once a marquee name on Saturday night television as host of Family Fortunes, but since giving up the light entertainment lark he now plies his trade as an actor, and a very good one at that. If you've not seen it, give yourself a treat and watch his bang-on-the-nose performance as “Les Dennis”, a delusional, whinging has-been, in Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's Extras.Only slightly less meta is his role in Danny Robins' dark comedy, in which Dennis plays Bobby Chalk who was once, with his comedy partner Eddie Cheese, a household name with 20 million viewers. But now the Read more ...