Comedy
Veronica Lee
Hannah Gadsby was awarded best show (jointly with John Robins) at the 2017 Edinburgh Comedy Awards for Nanette, which had already been given the equally prestigious Barry award at last year's Melbourne Comedy Festival. Gadsby draws us in gently, telling us that Nanette was so titled before she really knew what the show was going to be about, and she named it after meeting an unfriendly and unhelpful barista in smalltown Australia, in one of those places that she – a lesbian who is sometimes taken for a man – feels really unwelcome in.That's probably the lightest moment in Nanette's 80 minutes Read more ...
Veronica Lee
“I don't want to talk about Donald Trump,” Andrew Maxwell tells us as he comes on stage at the beginning of Showtime, because no matter what comics make up about the US President, he then goes and does something more weirdly comic, more comically weird, than they could ever invent.Instead the Irish standup, who has lived in the UK for the greater half of his life, muses on Brexit and beyond, seeing the world through a resident's eyes – but with the sharp observation of someone who will always remain an outsider.Daftness always quickly follows the seriousTalking of which, this keen European Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Chris Rock, another fine alumnus of the comedy factory known as Saturday Night Live, rarely comes to these shores, so his short arena tour was welcome. He last visited the UK 10 years ago as he had been busy with, among other things, presenting the Oscars, voicing Marty the Zebra in the Madagascar films and bringing up a family.The last subject was part of a lot of personal material in his 90-minute set, much of it about the break-up of his marriage, of which more later. First, though, he addressed the post-Harvey Weinstein world we now live in, assuring us that he no longer touches any Read more ...
Veronica Lee
In the early 1990s, a group of students at Leicester Polytechnic (now De Montfort University) staged an end-of-year comedy project. Three of them – Claire Walker, Abi Palmer and Geoff Rowe – developed the idea into what in 1994 became the first Leicester Comedy Festival; Walker and Palmer have gone on to other great things in the arts and Rowe remained as the festival's director. Under his leadership it has gone from strength to strength – second only to the Edinburgh Fringe in its stature in the industry. So drum-roll for the 25th incarnation of the Leicester Comedy Festival, with Ed Byrne Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The Edinburgh Fringe is usually the high point of the year for comedy, but in truth it wasn't a solid five-star year – although there were some stand-out performers. And if the test of good comedy is the shows that stay with you, and which you want to see again, then a few are definitely up there.Chief among that group was Hannah Gadsby's Nanette, an astonishing piece of work that she says is her valedictory show. That's because making comedy for other people from her life and experiences as a gay woman growing up in a deeply conservative and homophobic Tasmania – many of them painful or Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Margaret Cho takes no prisoners: if you don’t like good honest filth or feel uncomfortable around matters of feminism, sex and race, then this Korean-American comic is not for you. Cho was voted among the top 50 comics of all time by Rolling Stone magazine and was a protégée of Joan Rivers, a scabrously funny stand-up herself who skirted dangerously around taste and decency.Like Rivers, Cho appears to have no embarrassment in talking about her toilet habits or her sex life, and says her move from being lesbian to bisexual was because she realised she had “a place for cock in my life – inside Read more ...
Veronica Lee
A fair few Edinburgh Fringe shows are just that – things that work perfectly in the “let's do the show right here” spirit that permeates the festival, in a tiny (and often grotty) venue that adds hugely to the vibe. That's all well and good during August, of course, but come later in the year when a show moves beyond the festival confines it can lose much of its spark.So it's a delight that Rob Kemp's The Elvis Dead, which was a word-of-mouth hit before it deservedly gained a best newcomer nomination in the lastminute.com Edinburgh Comedy Awards, has made the journey south for a late-night Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's not often the publicity material for a comedy show has a health advisory attached. If you are allergic to eggs you may have to give Natalie Palamides' show Laid – which won best newcomer at the lastminute.com Edinburgh Comedy Awards at the Fringe in August – a miss, and that would be a shame.It is by turns delightful and disturbing, as Palamides – a Los Angeles-based actress and writer from Pittsburgh who appears as Buttercup in The Powerpuff Girls – explores motherhood, fertility and many things beyond as she brings her playful but knowing character to life. Literally, as at the start Read more ...
Veronica Lee
John Bishop was last on tour three years ago and he tells us that this show, Winging It, was inspired by two things that happened in the intervening period. Not the obvious Brexit (although it does make an appearance), but in that time he has passed the 50 landmark and his three sons have all left home.Bishop's calling card is laidback observational comedy, and as befits someone who started late at this comedy lark – he's celebrating 10 years as a full-time stand-up, having made the jump from being a rep for a pharmaceuticals company – he never forgets where he came from, a Liverpool council Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Kerry Godliman is such an affable and down-to-earth onstage presence that when she talks about whether she should move now that her area has upped and come – you can tell by the local baker making sourdough loaves – you think how much her neighbours would miss her.Moving – whether geographically or along the social scale – is the central theme of Stick or Twist (which I saw at Soho Theatre), but Godliman neatly swerves into lots of other territory including bad parenting, female friendship and the invasion of hipsters in her previously gritty London abode. If she and her husband sold up, she Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Mat Ewins comes on stage with a bullet belt slung across his chest. Indiana Jones he ain't, but what follows is a spoof on that film genre, a convoluted narrative that makes little sense but has a large degree of bombast as the show's title, Mat Ewins: Presents Adventureman 7 – the Return of Adventureman, suggests.It's an hour of multimedia storytelling, visual jokes and a lot of audience engagement (plus a brilliant long-form gag), in which Ewins trots out a daft tale involving a cursed amulet from Tutankhamen’s tomb that has gone missing from the British History Museum where he works, and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There were a lot of shocked and disappointed people after the EU referendum last year and several comics have used the result to fashion some good comedy, delivering state-of-the-nation material in their shows. For Ahir Shah, though, the more he thought about the result, the more he took it personally.He starts Control at Soho Theatre by giving us a mnemonic for his first name – Alpha, Hero, Indian, Romeo. It's a deft way into revealing his comic self – bombastic, teasing, self-deprecating, playful – and it's a persona he falls back into several times in the show (which I saw at the Edinburgh Read more ...