Comedy
Veronica Lee
The period before Christmas is, inevitably, when stand-ups rush to market. With so much material now available on YouTube, fewer comics release DVDs nowadays, but some of the best still do. This is theartsdesk's selection of the best live acts caught on film.Billy Connolly: High HorseBilly Connolly, now 74 and suffering from Parkinson's disease and prostate cancer, belies the ravages of his various illnesses. His delivery may be a little less impassioned, but by golly can he still tell a shaggy dog story better than any other comic. He deals frankly and funnily with his condition: “I'm going Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Tom Allen may have started life in Bromley, a non-descript south London suburb, but there was always a touch of Oscar Wilde about him – whether in his dress sense or his way with words, as we have learned from previous shows. It was obvious to him – and to school bullies – that he was not like them, a gay, bookish, clever boy with a very distinct way of expressing himself.It's his suburban background that Allen mines for his latest show, Indeed, which debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe. At first sight, it may appear to be his most biographical hour, featuring as it does a lengthy anecdote about Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Catherine Tate's television sketch shows - apart from a couple of specials devoted to her character Nan Taylor - were last screened in 2007, and she hasn't performed comedy live since her early days at the Edinburgh Fringe. So it was particularly good news for fans when she announced her first live UK tour.Ably abetted on stage by long-time collaborators Niky Wardley and Mathew Horne and co-writer Brett Goldstein, she brings back all the TV series' favourite characters in new sketches. She may have a raft of catchphrases - schoolgirl (“am I bovvered?”) Lauren; gay (“how Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Susan Calman's latest show has a delightfully silly title – Calman Before the Storm – which neatly doesn't pin her down to any particular theme but instead allows her to riff on a wide range of subjects. It makes for a pleasing hour of feelgood comedy.This show started life at the Edinburgh Fringe earlier this year, while the Rio Olympics were taking place; but Calman wasn't worried that she might lose potential audiences. She knows her demographic: “Oh, I’d love to go see Susan, but no… the taekwondo is on!”Calman infuses the hour with some terrifically sharp political comedyPeople Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Romesh Ranganathan has had an astonishing rise in comedy. The former teacher did his first full-length show at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2013, having made his debut there in 2010 in the newcomer competition, So You Think You're Funny? Now he's a television panel-show regular, and the second series of his travelogue Asian Provocateur is currently on the BBC. His success, he deadpans, is because, with his Sri Lankan heritage and a lazy eye, he ticks not one but two diversity boxes.It's down to talent, of course, and Ranganathan, a great student of comedy, knows what appeals. In truth his Read more ...
Veronica Lee
You may have thought that the Brexit vote in June would have been manna from heaven for Al Murray as the Pub Landlord, his knucklehead xenophobe creation. But in this uneven and – at two-and-a-half hours – overlong show, the referendum result and what it means for this country is mentioned early on but is hardly the focus of the show.And that's an enormous shame, as Murray's recent shows have put politics front and centre of his act to great and rejuvenating effect for a character that had, for me at least, long become stale and predictable.Let's Go Backwards Together augurs well in this Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Five nominations for the Edinburgh Comedy Award are surely a recommendation for James Acaster – and with his intelligent, offbeat humour and a wry delivery, he has rightly built up an impressive following at the Fringe (where I saw this show), having improved his craft year on year. Now he embarks on his biggest tour yet and is certain to add to his rapidly growing fanbase.His latest show, Reset, is a gem, a beautifully crafted and performed essay about having one's time again. In Acaster's very individual take on the subject, it could mean him going into the witness protection programme, or Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Australian stand-up Tom Ballard was nominated for best newcomer in last year's Edinburgh Comedy Awards for Taxis & Rainbows & Hatred; last month he went one better with The World Keeps Happening, which gained him a nomination for the main award.It's a loose follow-up to the 2015 show – more political observational comedy with a strong social conscience, but with rather less about him being gay. The blokey-looking 26-year-old mentions it early on with a gag about Grindr, but it's a minor element among the political and social comment.He starts with some easygoing gags about his Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Zoë Coombs Marr, Underbelly Cowgate ★★★Zoë Coombs Marr's debut show last year, Dave, gained a lot of attention, and rightly so. Dave is an old-school male comic whose line in misogyny doesn't sit well in modern comedy – even if his material might find an audience in the wider world.For this year's show, Trigger Warning, which won the Barry Award at the Melbourne Comedy Festival in April, Coombs Marr has broadened out the gag, here placing Dave in a situation in which he is hilariously out of place. To combat his critics, he tells us, he has stopped delivering any gags at all and will perform Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Richard Gadd, The Banshee Labyrinth ★★★★★Richard Gadd wryly tells us at the end of Monkey See Monkey Do that he thought it was a good idea to put this thought-provoking show, with its deep seam of theatricality and emotion, in the comedy section of the Fringe brochure. And in truth it could sit easily as a theatre show, albeit one with frequent laughs. But at its heart is a deeply personal and highly revelatory story about an incident in Gadd's life that caused him to re-evaluate who he is both as a person and as a man.It starts amiably enough with a Trainspotting-esque chase through streets Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Bridget Christie, The Stand ★★★★★When Bridget Christie planned this show, it was to be a work in progress about mortality for a tour starting later this year. But then the EU referendum happened, and everything changed. Within the space of a few weeks, she had written this heartfelt polemic about Brexit, and it's an astonishingly accomplished and moving work.She tells us that, with so many bad things happening in the world at the moment, she's going to do a nice, upbeat show about gardening, her new passion in life now that she is allowed to like the pursuit because she is past 40. She is Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, and has been for the past 42 years, ever since Garrison Keillor first reported on the town's goings-on in his weekly radio show A Prairie Home Companion. Keillor's purring baritone is the gentle voice of non-coastal America, and it is picked up by 700 local public radio stations by four million listeners. But at 72, and after a health scare, Keillor is stepping down. So anyone who wants to get a regular fix from Lake Wobegon will need to go back to the books.Keillor's first fame as a writer was as a regular contributor to William Shawn's The New Yorker Read more ...