Comedy
Veronica Lee
The purple cow has taken up its summer residency on the South Bank in London before making the journey to the Edinburgh Fringe in August. As ever, the line-up of performers is extensive: last night comic Tom Allen performed his chat show with the help of a few comedy guests.Allen is a likeable presence on stage and gave the audience 15 minutes of stand-up, with jokes old and new, before he brought on his guests. Walking across the stage, he unwisely tried a rock 'n' roll moment when, Eddie van Halen-like, he thrust a leg on to an onstage amp, before realising the implausibility of such a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Before he started making regular appearances on BBC Two's Mock the Week, Stewart Francis was an accomplished comic of some years' standing on the circuit - and that experience shows in his extensive UK tour, Outstanding in His Field, where he proves to be a slick performer whose set is delivered with exquisite timing.The audience at the Wycombe Swan let a few of his (very good) gags fly past them, mostly those about him being a Canadian, but no matter. Like fellow punster Tim Vine, Francis has a high joke count - puns, one-liners, non sequiturs, surreal invention and running gags - meaning Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Paul Merton is a very funny man, as anybody who watches Have I Got New For You will know. But fans of that programme will find his latest live show, billed as his return to stand-up, which he started doing 30 years ago, a very different experience. First thing to report is that it's not really stand-up, more an autobiographical run-through of his life, using jokes, songs and sketches, aided by some chums from his improv group Paul Merton's Strolling Players.The players – Richard Vranch, Lee Simpson and Suki Webster, his wife – are, like Merton, dressed in pale grey suits, and introduce him Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Storytelling, they say, is an almost lost art. Well, not while Benet Brandreth is around, it's not. Brandreth, Sandhurst graduate and a lawyer by day, studied Philosophy at Cambridge and has packed rather a lot into his life, real or imagined. He weaves a fantastical tale charting his story from graduation to last year - when, not for the first time, he saved the life of a member of the royal family.He comes on stage in a dinner jacket and places his handgun on a table, explaining that if No 10 calls he may have to steal away. What follows is an often surreal flight of fancy, an hour-long Read more ...
ash.smyth
I spent a fair chunk of last Sunday evening at Douglas Adams' 60th birthday party. This was a bit of a curve ball, not only because I'd never met the author of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - but also because he's been dead for nearly 11 years. But there he was, all the same, selling out the Hammersmith Apollo with a little help from Stephen Fry, Clive James, Jon Culshaw, a couple of thousand nerds in dressing gowns, and a posse of dancing rhinoceroses.The Supreme Hitch-Hiker, author of a five-part trilogy (now six-) and creator of Dirk Gently, was by all acounts a classic Read more ...
Veronica Lee
In Seven Years in the Bathroom, which he premiered at last year's Edinburgh Fringe, Alex Horne attempts to shoehorn the average man's 79-year lifespan - in which he says a remarkable seven years is spent in the bathroom - into an hour's comedy. It's certainly high-concept, and there's an awful lot of comedy to be mined from the subject.Horne comes on stage dressed in a bathrobe, and a neat costume gag follows. The sand in a large egg-timer placed on a desk on stage, which is strewn with several other props, flows away as Horne runs through a bunch of statistics while cleaning his teeth, Read more ...
ash.smyth
Put your hand up, please, if you’ve seen the multi-award-winning movie Blood Car. No? Fair enough. It was ostensibly released about two weeks ago – “in selected cinemas” – but you can be forgiven for not having tripped over any posters.Blood Car is (if one were feeling incredibly generous) the Napoleon Dynamite of the slasher-eco-vehicular-comedy-porn genre. It is the very near future – “like, two weeks from now” – and no-one can afford to run a petrol vehicle any more. Well-meaning vegan kindergarten-teacher Archie is working on a wheatgrass prototype engine (believe me when I tell you that Read more ...
Norma Burke
The first ever work of literary theory was Aristotle's Poetics, which was written on two separate papyruses - one on tragedy and the other on comedy. However, at some point the second was lost and along with it our most ancient understanding of the comedy genre.Although there have been many important attempts to unpick the secrets and meaning of comedy since - Freud got himself in knots trying to deconstruct it and other thinkers such as Hobbes, Koestler, Bergson and Kant also made inroads - there has been nothing to match the gravitas of Aristotle's Poetics. What insights were in this Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There was a time when Jackie Mason was the pre-eminent New York Jewish comedian. He had started his career in those postwar Catskills hotels catering to vacationing Jewish families from New York City, which became known as the Borscht Belt. The circuit spawned a list of talents including Mel Brooks, Woody Allen and Joan Rivers, among many, many more, and it was a phenomenon that prompted the film Dirty Dancing. So due respect to a veteran who has been in the business for several decades and now, at the age of 75, is performing his farewell UK tour, called Fearless.What a shame I can't bid him Read more ...
bruce.dessau
The death of Peter Cook on 9 January 1995 was my JFK moment. I'll never forget what I was doing when I heard the news. I was driving from London to Granada Studios in Manchester to interview comedian Caroline Aherne. At the time she was married to the New Order bass guitarist Peter Hook, so when the radio announced that Peter Cook was dead my ears did a double take.I did not pull onto the hard shoulder and have a sob, but it certainly cast a shadow over the rest of the day. That and the fact that my interview was cancelled. This was in pre-mobile days so no one had been able to tell me Aherne Read more ...