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
In 2016 Catherine Tate performed live comedy for the first time since her Edinburgh Fringe days at the beginning of her career, and the show was deservedly both a critical and box-office success. She later took it to Australia and New Zealand and now finishes with a West End run, with some updated sketches and two new cast members.Tate's best-known characters from her television series all make an appearance; Derek Faye, the elderly gay man in denial of his sexuality (“How very dare you”), Irish nurse Bernie, passive-aggressive office worker Kate (“Go on, have a guess”), Geordie Georgie, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The highlight of 2018 for me was the return of two mighty sets of talents – Flight of the Conchords and The League of Gentlemen – and it was heartwarming to see that they had lost none of their sharpness, wit or love of performing in front of a live audience. In stand-up, while a lot of established comics were again producing the goods, one newcomer, a young Irishwoman, stood out. We lost some comedy legends this year, too – Ken Dodd, Barry Elliott of the Chuckle Brothers and Jim Bowen, who had all had a career resurgence as a new generation had discovered their work, are now, to borrow Dodd' 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
The #MeToo movement is barely a year old, but it is already prompting some clever and insightful comedy – from standalone jokes or set-pieces in several comics’ shows, or, here, a very funny but frequently discomfiting hour that delves deep into the subjects of gender, relationships and toxic masculinity.Natalie Palamides, an LA-based actress, burst on to the UK comedy scene last year with her award-winning show Laid, which examined motherhood and fertility, and much beyond. Nate initially appears to follow in the same vein: a mime to start the show, then some daft interactive comedy to 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
The Edinburgh Fringe does throw up some oddities – in comedy shows, of course, but also in its dishing out of awards. And so it was that Ciarán Dowd's marvellous Don Rodolfo deservedly gained the Edinburgh Comedy Award for best newcomer, even though he's an old Fringe hand. But as his previous work was as part of the sketch troupe BEASTS he was eligible for this, his debut solo show.Don Rodolfo is a famed swordsman, in both senses of the word, swashing his buckle throughout the land in 17th-century Spain, and Dowd presents a wonderfully daft, energetic hour of storytelling as Rodolfo hunts 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 ...