standup comedy
Veronica Lee
Rahul Subramanian is a well-established comic in his native Mumbai, as evidenced by the appreciative audience of Indian expats gathered at Soho Theatre. His sellout dates in London acted as previews to his debut run at the Edinburgh Fringe, which starts on 2 August.Subramanian is one of several South Asian comics Soho Theatre has introduced to London and Edinburgh comedy fans, and it's a mutually productive arrangement; last year, Urooj Ashfaq, another star of the Mumbai standup scene whom the theatre promoted in the UK, made her Fringe debut and walked away with the best newcomer gong at the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Hannah Berner isn't a big name in stand-up (yet), but she's well known enough in the United States to have come to Netflix's attention. Her fame comes from TikTok and Instagram (where she has three million followers), her podcasts and formerly being a cast member of the Bravo reality series Summer House. We Ride at Dawn is her first, but I suspect not her last, Netflix special.In the stand-up hour filmed at the Fillmore in Philadelphia, the Brooklyn-born comic muses on a range of subjects – mostly sex, politics and relationships – but also riffs on Disney princes and the things that annoy her Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The most striking thing about the 1976 documentary (restored and re-released by the BFI) is just how polite Billy Connolly comes across as. Not that he's impolite now, but the raucous stage presence and vibrant chatshow interviewee was yet to fully form.Murray Grigor's film, which follows Connolly's first gigs in Ireland in 1975, shows the comedian long before he achieved the national treasure status he now enjoys. The Dublin and Belfast dates came just after Connolly's appearance on Michael Parkinson's chat show had made him an overnight star, and backstage in Dublin the Glaswegian frets Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Clinton Baptiste – clairvoyant, medium and psychic – first appeared briefly as a character in Peter Kay’s Phoenix Nights on Channel 4. Alex Lowe has since developed him through Clinton Baptiste’s Paranormal Podcast and his live shows, and now he's touring his latest, Roller Ghoster!, which I saw at Leicester Square Theatre in London.Baptiste has a cult following, as the extensive tour dates attest, and there are lots of in-jokes his fans are waiting for, including “He's a nonce!” A lot of the character's cultural references come from the 1970s and 80s, making this a lovely and affectionate Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Rhod Gilbert is disarmingly honest about his thought process when he received his diagnosis of head and neck cancer in 2022. Following quickly from his fears about his possible imminent death, another thought flashed through his mind: “I can get a show out of this.” And it is that trademark cheeky humour that runs through his latest show, Rhod Gilbert and the Giant Grapefruit, which begins with an affirmative “I'm alive!”Some will know the Welshman's cancer story through the moving documentary A Pain in the Neck which aired on Channel 4 last year. For the uninitiated he starts here by riffing Read more ...
Veronica Lee
An appearance on Taskmaster and the publication of her acclaimed memoir Strong Female Character have helped propel Fern Brady into the comedy big time – and now comes the accolade of her first Netflix special, Autistic Bikini Queen, which was recorded in Bristol last year.She fesses up at the top of the show that, despite its title, this hour is not exclusively about her autism, which she was diagnosed with in her mid-thirties. She does, though, update us on how the condition affects her and which, she quickly informs us, is not a superpower – there's a withering putdown of that notion – but Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Pierre Novellie opens his show by telling how his latest show, Why Are You Laughing?, came into being. It started, he says, when he was heckled at a previous show by someone shouting out: “I have Asperger's and I think you have it too.” It's an arresting start but Novellie doesn't mention it again until the final section of the show.Instead he offers us diversions by way of biography, starting with his name and upbringing, which covers a few countries across two continents, from South Africa to the Isle of Man via France and Italy. Novellie then describes some of the worst gigs he has played Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The Glaswegian comedian Janey Godley, the woman who put the punch in punchline, has what she would call a “mooth” on her. It delivers pith and grit and lots of short words needing asterisks. Though possibly not for much longer, as she is in the throes of ovarian cancer.But that didn’t stop her doing a tour called "Not Dead Yet" last year. The title is an echo of the mordant humour she has purveyed since embarking on a comedy career in 1994, after the family pub she and her husband Sean ran was taken over by his brothers. That the family was more the Sicilian kind is typical of Godley’s CV. Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Catherine Bohart opens by telling us that we're seeing her at the beginning of a long tour – before her energy flags, she says. It's difficult to believe, however, that the Irishwoman ever performs at anything less than full throttle, and so it proves here with Again, With Feelings, a show about where her life is at the moment.She's 35 and very definitely not where she thought she would be – and certainly not where her parents might have hoped; married, with kids and owning a house. Instead Bohart is unmarried, child-free and her living arrangements... Well she fills us in on those, as she Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It takes a talented comic to turn a horrible life experience into comedy, but Miles Jupp is nothing if not talented. Add in a bit of self-depreciation, a smidgen of philosophical musing and a dollop of ruderies about bodily functions and you have On I Bang, which charts the comic's diagnosis with – and, thankfully, recovery from – a benign brain tumour.Jupp starts at the beginning: August 2021 and the Jupp family are on holiday. As with much of the comic's material, it anecdotally describes the everydayness of most people's lives, and, more specifically, the daily frustrations of being Miles Read more ...
Veronica Lee
In the middle of another age of austerity, a climate crisis and seemingly intractable international conflicts, it's cheering that a comic should tour with a show called Bafflingly Optimistic. Even more so when that comedian is Andy Parsons, whose sardonic humour – much of it about the British and Britishness – could never be described as rose-tinted.Parsons has carved out a solid career with his intelligent takes on the British political landscape and his thoughtful ruminations on where we are in the world. He knows his stuff, as evidenced here by a tour de force treatise on economics; if Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's probably fair to say that Paul Foot is an acquired taste for some; his absurdist, poetic comedy isn't for everyone but he has built a strong and loyal following without the help of television exposure. And now in Dissolve, which debuted at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe, his comedy takes a more personal turn as he describes the mental health problems that have dogged him for decades.Foot draws the audience in gently with some trademark whimsy though, as he describes the “disturbances” in his head and also tells a convoluted tale about a bird. Yes, it's a contrived metaphor he tells us, but he Read more ...