Comedy
Jasper Rees
Robin Williams, who has died at the age of 63, was a very American comedian. The flow of invention that erupted from inside him had an unstoppable, domineering, emetic brilliance. In chat shows, performing stand-up, and in his greatest role as a DJ entertaining the troops in Vietnam, he was a not quite human force of nature.Williams had his first starring role in the sitcom Mork and Mindy, as an alien learning the ways of earth. The role lingered over his career as a kind of definition. He never played regular guys: instead he was a shoo-in for shrinks, outcasts, weirdos, penguins and, most Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Andrew Maxwell (****) tells the Scots in the audience that he’s going to “rip the shit out of everything they hold dear” in Hubble Bubble, his take on the independence referendum. He doesn’t quite do that but it’s a witty and thoughtful take on the issues surrounding the vote.Maxwell points out that the people of the British Islands are about 90 per cent genetically the same – “the rest is just flavourings” – and the show’s title suggests the Irishman finds nationalism a heady, dangerous brew. He says that Northern Ireland may be less than happy to wake up on 19 September to find Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
In her book How To Be a Woman, Times columnist Caitlin Moran explains the difference between strip clubs and burlesque shows, and why the latter are perfectly acceptable to feminism. “In burlesque, the power rests with the person taking their clothes off, as it always should do in polite society.” My Stories, Your Emails, which opened last night in the Purcell Room at the Southbank Centre, is cabaret artist Ursula Martinez’s way of making exactly the same point. Martinez was subjected to an unwanted level of exposure (sorry...) some years ago, when a video of her clever little striptease Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Comics rarely start a show by referencing the ending of a previous one, but Sarah Kendall has first to do a bit of housekeeping to explain the genesis of Touchdown. The payoff for her last show was her dropping the c-bomb on her high-school gym teacher, Coach Harris, but when her mother attended a gig she said to her daughter: “It didn’t quite happen like that, though, did it?”Indeed it didn’t; the punchline was a fabrication for the sake of a good gag, and here Kendall, a London-based Australian, gives the back story in an intricately woven tale about her teenage years. She was a gawky, Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Booker T Jones seduced, his delivery a river of molasses, his beaming smile so suave it was difficult to believe he was, actually, singing the blues. Damon Albarn coaxed, like a well-meaning dad who’s taken his kids on a rainy picnic (a thunderstorm engulfed the end of his set) and wants them, in spite of everything, to have a good time. Lily Allen flounced and stropped; Kelis shook her booty, looking, in a gleaming golden dress, like a queen bee instructing the drones. Rudimental bounced, like Tigger; Atomic Bomb, playing the music of William Onyeabor, had a massive party onstage; and Tuareg Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Chelsea Handler may be an unknown name for many in Britain - although some will know her from her spat with Piers Morgan on his now-cancelled US chat show - but there were plenty of fans at the London Palladium to watch the actress, comic and chat show host making her UK stand-up debut, with a one-off show based on her travelogue of a trip to Africa with some friends, Uganda Be Kidding Me.In typical American stand-up style, the show was only an hour long, and she didn't deviate from the script to riff on local subjects or engage with the audience. When a fan called out for “the kayak Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It could have been an embarrassment all round; a bunch of blokes in their seventies revisiting material that was anarchic and transformative 40 years ago but which they are now performing for 10 lucrative nights in the home of commercial comedy. Fear not, though, Monty Python Live (almost): One Down Five to Go – surely the final farewell tour – proves that quality endures. And in the hands of the show's deviser and director, Eric Idle, it can be made into something new and fresh as well.The original television show, Monty Python's Flying Circus, aired on the BBC from 1969 to 1974 and the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
She may have been performing for more than 30 years, but it takes some cojones to do your first solo show at the age of 56. Dawn French, with neither long-time partner Jennifer Saunders nor fellow cast members on stage, makes her debut with Thirty Million Minutes, an autobiographical show about the 30 million minutes (give or take) she has spent on this earth. She is doing it in the “sliver of time between the madness of my menopause and the impending madness of my dementia”.It's less a stand-up show, more a one-woman “how-to” life guide and, as directed by theatre and opera director Michael Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Adrienne Truscott's show was awarded the Edinburgh Comedy Awards' panel prize at the Fringe last year (Bridget Christie won the main prize for another avowedly feminist show), and if it hadn't been for its thought-provoking content and highly original delivery, then it surely deserved an accolade just for the title, Asking For It: A One-Lady Rape About Comedy Starring Her Pussy and Little Else!Truscott is one half of American performance artists the Wau Wau Sisters, famous for pushing the boundaries of cabaret/circus genres, and it should come as no surprise that she walks on stage in a crazy Read more ...
Veronica Lee
David Baddiel last did solo stand-up in 2004, when he walked out of a corporate gig after calling a bunch of bankers the c-word. Since then, he's spent his time mostly writing novels and doing some television and radio projects. It's his general absence from TV, he tells us in Fame: Not the Musical - an intelligent, witty and thoughtful examination of modern celebrity - that arouses pity in some members of the public who recognise him. If he's not on the telly, his career must be on the skids, right?Baddiel first became famous as one half of two immensely successful double acts, firstly with Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Science has fallen in love with comedy – or maybe that should be the other way round. Whichever, geek is now chic, and being in possession of a brain is something to be laughed with, rather than at. All of which explains the popularity of Radio 4's The Infinite Monkey Cage, or Dara Ó Briain's School of Hard Sums on the Dave channel, both of which employ a large dose of comedy to discuss some terrifically complex topics.Helen Arney, Steve Mould and Matt Parker are all scientists by training and perform comedy separately as well as together under the moniker Festival of the Spoken Nerd. Their Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Nina Conti is a postmodern visitor from a previous era. Ventriloquism, the remarkable skill of vocal misdirection, was a staple of yesteryear’s mainstream. Its practitioners were odd men pedalling flaccid Saturday-night humour. And indeed she inherited her skill from a much older man. Ken Campbell, the polymathic entertainer who for a time was her lover, introduced her as a young actress to ventriloquism and devised a play called Let Me Out!!! for her which she took to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2001. When he died in 2008, Conti inherited his collection of puppets.Conti has built her act around Read more ...