standup comedy
Jasper Rees
Stewart Lee is in Eeyorish mood. The BBC have not yet got round to recommissioning his acclaimed television show. They have been more bountiful, he grumbles, with Russell Howard, and you can hear the older man’s withering scorn for the younger, blonder cherub contractually obliged never to step away from the cameras. On the plus side, he is in residence at this cosy but capacious theatre until February, a booking that only the promise of television audiences can gift. New recruits have therefore been persuaded in, but they do not receive a friendly greeting: the understanding is that they Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There's nothing like winning a gong to rock your world. Last August, Russell Kane won the prestigious Edinburgh Comedy Award for his Fringe show and his level of celebrity skyrocketed. But within a few months his marriage broke down - and the resulting introspection provided the starting point for a very fine show, Manscaping, which I saw at the Palace Theatre in Westcliff-on-Sea.Kane was very much on home territory – he could walk to the theatre, he told us – and much of the opening 10 minutes was spent guying the locals. Ockendon and Westcliff in particular got it in the neck, for very Read more ...
graeme.thomson
Following a rejuvenating foray back to his one-man-with-a-mike stand-up roots throughout 2009 and 2010, this summer Dave Gorman returned to the Edinburgh Fringe after an eight-year absence to launch Dave Gorman's PowerPoint Presentation. The man who invented the genre of data-heavy, technology-based interactive comedy with Are You Dave Gorman? and Googlewhack Adventure once again found a haven in the Apple Mac and comedy pie chart; could we have been forgiven for thinking that he was playing it just a little safe?Now Gorman is taking the show on tour – and gosh it’s good. Not Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Angie Le Mar, who recently celebrated 25 years in showbusiness, has certainly packed a lot into her life; she's a comic, writer, director, radio presenter and producer, and now has written and performs In My Shoes, her new one-woman show (directed by Femi Elufowoju), a collection of six interwoven characters. It follows her first stage outing, as the writer of Do You Know Where Your Daughter Is?, a thought-provoking account of the sexual and domestic abuse of young women.Her first character is the loud and brash American soul singer Falushilah Falashilay, whom we see in a shoe shop buying Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It has been four years since Alan Carr toured with a live show, and he's been much missed from the circuit. From his first appearances at the Edinburgh Fringe when he entertained audiences with tales of his past life as a call-centre worker and being the woefully non-sporty son of a football-manager father, he was destined for stardom.Television appearances – game shows, quizzes and chat shows – followed, and despite his huge recent success I think producers have not yet managed to find the right vehicle for the ever-smiling and hugely engaging Carr. He follows in a line of a certain Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Not everyone likes Lee Evans and his bespoke brand of simian gurning and jerky rubberised motion. But he is very much to the taste of a majority of the comedy-going classes. Few other stand-ups – you can count them on one hand – could spend a season touring the UK’s soulless edge-of-town arenas and not have to worry about performing to empty banks of raised seating. Evans tore into two sets of an hour each last night at Wembley Arena without, apparently, a thought of conserving any energy for the five nights still to come and the long list of bookings beyond. Such is his hypnotic hold that Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Stephen Merchant has played the sleeping partner for so long in his professional relationship with Ricky Gervais that it was perhaps inevitable he would address the issue at the top of the show. The good thing about going on tour, apart from meeting ladies, is, he says, that he doesn't have to share the profits with "you know who".Although Gervais is the louder of the two and Merchant usually remained behind the camerain their early career together, the latter has steadily come to the fore; after occasional appearances in The Office a more substantial role in Extras (pictured below, with Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Lee Evans (b 1964) has been doing his brand of unruly physical comedy on stage since his teens. In recent years, however, he has laid to rest the perception, held since he won the Perrier at Edinburgh in 1993, that he is an effing and blinding reincarnation of gormless Norman Wisdom. He has played Hamm in Endgame followed by Leo Bloom in The Producers and then one of the two gunmen in Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter. He surprised critics and audiences alike with the depth and subtlety of his acting and the mercurial brilliance of his gift for musical comedy. But his job, he insists, is stand-up, and 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 ...
ash.smyth
Being hailed as “the comedian’s comedian” is all well and good after you’re dead; but – as is often the way with great artists – it didn’t much help to pay the bills while Bill Hicks was walking and talking.Early on in Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas’s new 100-minute semi-animated biopic, Hicks’s sometime colleague and boyhood best friend, Dwight Slade, makes the claim that: “Society cherishes its funny people.” Perhaps that’s true now, if we’re talking about stadium comedy; perhaps that’s true if everyone can agree on a working definition of “funny”. But if this documentary showed anything, it 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 ...