Comedy
Veronica Lee
A brain tumour isn't usually the subject of a comedy show but Britney, written and performed by comedy duo Charly Clive and Ellen Robertson, is just that. It's “the true story of what happens to two best friends when one of them [Clive] gets a brain tumour” – the size of a golf ball, her father helpfully pointed out.Clive's dad is just one of the large cast of characters who appear in Britney. The story starts in 2016 when the two women, who have been friends since they were 14, had both recently graduated, Clive from drama school in New York, Robertson from Cambridge University. Clive Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Tommy Tiernan is something of an institution in his native Ireland, as a stand-up comic, newspaper columnist, sometime chat show host and full-time controversialist. Now his appearance as Da Gerry in Channel 4's Derry Girls has brought him to a wider audience – both geographically and generationally – and deservedly so.Tiernan arrives on stage with little fanfare, and proceeds to do what he does best, sharing stories with the audience as if we're just having a chat over a pint. From small beginnings he builds fantastical tales, but ones that often have an underlying serious point to make, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Angela Barnes is one of life’s pessimists, she tells us at the top of the hour, but she’s trying not to be so world-weary, and to turn negatives into positives. And, while there’s so much awfulness going on around us, why not try to lighten the mood a little?In Rose-Tinted she does just that, talking a mile a minute with observational comedy shot through with some acute political point-making and some very fine one-liners in a show packed with gags. After a preamble about being a catastrophist – her glass isn't just half-empty, it's lying shattered on the floor – she launches into a masterly Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Most people in the UK know American actor and stand-up Aziz Ansari from Parks and Recreation, where he played the sarcastic and underachieving local government official Tom Haverford. Comedy fans will also know him as a successful club comic on both US coasts, and from his Netflix specials. But in truth, most people now know him for the #MeToo imbroglio he found himself in last year, where a woman accused him of sexual misconduct on a date, which he denies, saying the encounter was consensual.So there is an air of “will he, won't he” in the room as Ansari performs his new show, Road to Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Well this is a nice change from the standard stand-up fare. Not many comics have a DJ introduce them with a cracking set of his own, and even fewer tour as part of a double bill with material that moves seamlessly from one set to the other as they dig down into race and ethnicity from either side of the Atlantic. But Palestinian-American comic Mo Amer and British actor-comic Guz Khan are doing just that in Persons of Interest, and it works a treat.American DJ Cipha Sounds sets the tone for the evening when he plays tracks that guy certain ethnic stereotypes – “This is for all the white women Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ed Gamble starts the hour by telling us why his latest show is called Blizzard; he and a bunch of comic friends we stranded in New York by bad weather and it made the news - yet, strangely, the headline wasn’t a play on his name - a gift for hacks - but on the monicker of one of his mates. Cue faux outrage.Gamble is too nice a guy to really mind someone else getting the spotlight - in fact he namechecks the other comics on the ill-fated trip - and the excellent audience work he does attests to an easygoing style that firmly underpins his personal, observational comedy.A large part of the show Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Have you ever felt the hot shame of saying or doing the wrong thing? Not just embarrassment – that's for amateurs, says Lou Sanders in her wonderfully honest and revealing show Shame Pig, in which she essays some of her life's red-faced moments. Embarrassment is fleeting and lends itself to a good anecdote (or a fine joke in a stand-up set), she says, while shame is a much more corrosive emotion, and one that young women in particular burden themselves with unnecessarily.The show is part stand-up, part performance, as her brief but whip-smart take-off of a TED talk at the top of the hour Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Sheeps, the sketch comedy threesome, had never really gone away but when they performed Live and Loud Selfie Sex Harry Potter at the Edinburgh Fringe last year after a four-year absence, it was called a comeback. More a welcome reunion, as its members – Liam Williams, Daran Johnson and Alastair Roberts – had been busy doing solo projects.The show, which they have brought to the Soho Theatre for a short run, is in the same vein as their previous work – original and intelligent sketch comedy with a touch of edginess and the surreal.It’s an insightful exploration of long-lasting Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The striking cover for the Brighton Festival 2019 programme shouts out loud who this year’s Guest Director is. Silhouetted in flowers, in stunning artwork by Simon Prades, is the unmistakeable profile of Malian musician Rokia Traoré. Taking place between 4th and 26th May at a host of south coast venues, this year’s Festival, which launched its schedule of events this morning, looks to be a multi-faceted extravaganza with true international reach. Once again, theartsdesk is proud to be a media partner.“I set out to bring new voices to the city to tell their stories,” Traoré explained, “ Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The first line of this show is “I'm the guy who you meet right after you come out of a long-term relationship.” On the night I see The Guy Who..., Adam Riches has three tries with it before he meets his target, a woman who has been dumped by a long-standing boyfriend.His character, whose name we never learn, is reading the Sunday papers – “the physical edition!” – with reading glasses placed artistically in his mouth as he ponders what he has just read, while we take our seats in this funky bar in King's Cross. He's super woke, super cool and super suave. But he's also super dangerous.He Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Lost Voice Guy – aka Lee Ridley – won Britain’s Got Talent last year. He's a unique talent in that his cerebral palsy means he is unable to speak, and so he delivers his comedy through a synthesizer controlled via his iPad.If you saw him on BGT, you will know Ridley uses his disability to the full in his comedy; he mocks himself and others, telling a story about the game of top trumps he played with a deaf and blind man on the train as to who deserved the disabled space more – daring to top that with a joke about the blind's man's guide dog. His gag about able-bodied people being impatient if Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Daniel Sloss's latest show is called X, to denote his 10th show. The Scottish comic started in comedy as a teenager in 2009 when a lot of his material was knob and wank gags, but in recent years his work has had a progressively edgier feel, including shows that delved into his sister's death from cerebral palsy and the childhood grooming from which he had a lucky escape.At the top of the show, Sloss tells us he's going to make us feel uncomfortable, but in truth at the start X feels more like a comfortable settling-in, with some of the puerile jokes that long-time fans such as myself would Read more ...