standup comedy
Veronica Lee
Alan Davies used to be a regular on the stand-up circuit, before acting and other television work, including ad campaigns and being a panellist on the long-running quiz QI, took him away from live comedy. But now, after a break of more than a decade, he's back on the road and the rest has clearly served him well.He got the mentions of Jonathan Creek and QI out of the way fairly quickly as he did some chitchat with the audience. He appeared unfazed by the largely unresponsive audience at the Hackney Empire, where I saw the show, but he turned a friendly heckle - which considerably disrupted Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Among the many things Jenny Eclair does these days - writing novels, panto, appearing on television in various guises - she has found time to go back on the road with Eclairious. TV hasn't curbed her deliciously potty mouth, thank goodness, and even though she says by way of introduction “Please lower your expectations”, she proves to be on fine form, as ever.Her material is much of the same old shtick - railing against the ravages of time on her body and libido, the shortcomings of men and the irritations of other people's children - and whereas a comic such as Jack Dee delivers a similarly Read more ...
graeme.thomson
“When I was a teenager even I had a period when apparently I was quite morose,” Jack Dee tells the Edinburgh crowd, his hangdog features projecting various extremes of existential agony. “But, hey, I got through it." This may be Dee’s first standup tour for six years, but it’s very much business as usual in terms of perpetuating his role as comedy’s Mr Grumpy, eternally exasperated, irritable, acerbic. And, truth be told, these days a tiny bit predictable.Apparently Dee decided to tour again because he figured someone had to keep the magic of 2012 going. He does indeed take a brief frolic Read more ...
Veronica Lee
For the past few years Russell Kane has mined much of his comedy from his fraught relationship with his father, now dead. It's a neat twist then to postulate his latest show, Posturing Delivery, on his relationship with "Ivan", Kane's entirely imaginary son.It's high concept, and in many a comic's hands it simply wouldn't work, but Kane - as ever flouncing and skittering across the stage, energetically acting out much of the comedy, complete with perfect mimicry and a lot of campery - pulls it off, drawing us expertly into his fantasy world in which he wonders what kind of dad he would be now Read more ...
Veronica Lee
If the first rule of being a novelist is to write about what you know, then the first rule of comedy is to be yourself. And in that respect Shappi Khorsandi starts with an advantage, as being herself means she's warm and likeable and the audience are instantly on her side. And when it comes to her material, she started in stand-up with another advantage, in that her parents had to escape persecution in Iran (her father is a satirist who upset the ayatollahs), and for a while the family were given protection officers when they moved to London.She has always mined her own life for material, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Greg Davies strolls onstage to the sound of Fatboy Slim’s remix of Wildchild’s “Renegade Master”, the “44 year old renegade master,” as he drily observes. From there he initially dwells on middle age and the way his stomach has expanded. His manner is so genial that his gigantic size - 6’8” – is not especially immediate or imposing. Clad in jeans and a black T-shirt he achieves the rare feat, throughout the 90-minute set, of being likeable and funny without ever utilising viciousness. The show he’s now touring is called The Back of My Mum’s Head and we’re soon into why – primarily Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Danny Bhoy is big in Scotland and Canada and huge Down Under, as they say, but is a surprisingly unfamiliar name to many. I'm not sure, other than a lack of a television presence, why he's not as well-known throughout the UK as he should be: he's an extremely affable, laidback Scot whose brand of observational, conversational comedy is easy on the ear.His latest show, Dear Epson, borrows heavily from Henry Root, in that it's framed around spoof complaint letters to various companies. It's a straightforward - some may say uninspired, even lazy - set-up, but with it Bhoy creates a show of sharp Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Kevin Bridges, an affable young Glaswegian, has had a meteoric rise in comedy. He started gigging at 17, made his solo Edinburgh Fringe debut in 2009, where he played in a 50-seater and earned an Edinburgh Comedy Awards newcomer nomination, and returned the following year to a sold-out run in a 700-seat theatre.But his real breakthrough was being booked on the BBC's Michael McIntyre's Comedy Roadshow in 2009, which brought him to an audience of millions. His early television success means that much of his material is TV-friendly, but his live shows include more uncompromising material. Read more ...
Veronica Lee
First a confession: I've never been a great fan of Michael McIntyre. He's a nice bloke for sure, works at his craft and is a slick performer with a huge following, both live and on television. Plus - and this is one of the best compliments I can pay to a stand-up because it's a difficult skill to pull off - he's one of the best MCs in the business. But I can't get past the feeling that some of his material, to borrow shamelessly from another context, has the whiff of previously used about it.But that's my problem and, to judge from the packed house at the O2 Arena, not something that bothers Read more ...
Veronica Lee
James Acaster: Prompt, Pleasance Courtyard *** James Acaster has certainly been studying his craft since he made his Fringe debut with an unmemorable show last year, and it shows in Prompt. Lots of comedy tropes are utilised, some of them to great effect, while others feel simply mechanical. He uses repetition, callbacks, audience participation in a show full of whimsy and the most surprising subjects for comedy.The callbacks - lots of them – join seemingly unconnected stories, such as his study into different kinds of bread, taking one's partner to a club - “like taking an apple to an Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Tony Law: Maximum Noonsense, The Stand Tony Law, Canadian by way of Trinidad and Tobago, has been kicking around the comedy circuit for several years with a style of madcap humour that many have delighted in but others have found self-indulgent. But with Maximum Noonsense he has retained all the free-flowing joy of his comedy while reining in some of the slacker elements. It's a marvellous concoction of silliness and sly humour.He starts with his “banter” section, wherein he ignores the women in the room and talks only to blokes about women and their weird attitudes to things such Read more ...
Veronica Lee
I, Tommy, Gilded Balloon **** Everybody will be familiar with Tommy Sheridan's story, and not necessarily because they closely follow Scottish politics at their most internecine. Rather because the Glaswegian socialist went from being barely a paragraph in broadsheets to being plastered over the front pages of tabloids after a series of revelations – which he strongly denies – about visiting swingers' clubs.It was once all so different, as Rab C Nesbitt creator Ian Pattison shows us in this amusing essay of Sheridan's rise and fall. The extremely charismatic Sheridan was adored by men Read more ...