The last time I saw bouncers standing at the foot of the stage at a comedy venue was at a Roy "Chubby" Brown gig. Back then, I remarked how nicely behaved his fans were, as indeed were Frankie Boyle’s last night; however, another quality the two comics share is that they both score pretty highly on the offensiveness scale. So is it that Glaswegian Boyle, whose latest show is entitled I Would Happily Punch Every One of You in the Face and who frequently addresses his audiences as cunts and fuckers, can talk the talk but would run away squealing were one of his audience to mount the stage and Read more ...

Stewart Lee is pretending to be mildly crap. He keeps discussing how he is none too funny, but the point is that his commentary on his own shortcomings thereby turns into a droll running gag. He achieves this with deadpan relish. His delivery is, of course, characteristically sardonic, albeit with an amused glint in the eye. He also frequently stops to spell out how the mechanics of his routine are supposed to be working: po-faced mini-lectures on the art of being hilarious.In Vegetable Stew (no fancy set, just a mic stand and a stool), he appears to be making excuses at the outset, stating Read more ...

The mistake was probably that I hadn’t tanked up beforehand. Clues were there. Soho Theatre is over a pub. 9.45pm start. Who’s going to turn up in those circumstances completely sober? Who would be mad enough to turn up in Soho at 9.45pm stone-cold sober? And a four-star Edinburgh Fringe show had not necessarily been assessed by altogether un-punchdrunk viewers, lurching as they do (and I have done) between five shows a night.Well, something had to account for The Boy With Tape On His Face being, sigh, not that funny. Sometimes, as Penelope Keith moaned in The Good Life, I feel that I’m not a Read more ...

Greg Davies is a comedian who laughs along to his own material. A conspiratorial look glints in his eye, a hint of fruity mischief plays on his lips. The adage that you should never be amused by your own punchlines is, of course, a tall tower of rubbish – different jokes for different blokes – but Davies’s enjoyment of his own routine begs a couple of questions. Is it as funny as he thinks it is? Or is it funny because he thinks it is? And then there is the greatest existential quandary of all, which has knitted the brows of philosophers since time immemorial. Exactly how hilarious is Read more ...

There’s just the one joke with Lee Nelson. When I caught a short slice of him earlier this year the joke more than filled the available slot. Nelson has since been granted his own show on BBC Three. Now that he’s out on tour, the question arises of how much celebration of chavs, benefit cheats, petty tea-leaves and other totally amoral representatives of Broken Britain you can stomach before the grin starts to get a little fixed.In the world view of Lee Nelson, a chirpy south Londoner in a baseball cap and knee-high kecks, women are all happy slags, especially the ones in the front few rows ( Read more ...

It’s an interesting concept that Adam Hills has come up with for his latest show, Mess Around. The ever-smiling and hugely likeable Australian - a longtime sellout hit at the Edinburgh Fringe but who has yet to make a broader breakthrough like his peers - is a past master of audience interaction, so why not ditch the material and make that the show?“Less a show and more of a chat,” he calls it, and I’m sure that when this approach works, on those nights when he mines a seam of comedy gold among his fans, that it can be huge fun. But on the first night of his 10-show run at Soho and despite Read more ...

Russell Kane, a thoroughly deserving nominee, was the surprise winner of the Edinburgh Comedy Award (ECA) - the bookies’ money was on young American Bo Burnham - with a show that explores his troubled relationship with his late father, a man with some very right-wing opinions on life and politics. Kane describes Smokescreens and Castles as “an elegy” to his dad, but it could equally be described as a riveting and frequently hilarious socio-political documentary on a working-class boy made good, the first member of his family to go to university and now making a living in the liberal arts.At Read more ...

Ten years ago Ben Elton (b 1959) would have needed no introduction. When still very young he became the mouth of a bolshy new generation of alternative comedians, as they were then known. Saturday Live - later Friday Night Live - was consciously modelled on the American template, and seemed very cutting edge. In fact all its alumni soon migrated to the mainstream: Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, freshly down from Cambridge, played Jeeves and Wooster. Harry Enfield became the face of BBC One sketch comedy. And what of Elton? His career went centrifugal.He co-wrote two game-changing sitcoms - The Read more ...

Call a comic surreal and you hand him or her a licence to be as self-indulgent as they desire. Think of Vic Reeves, who long ago started believing that the mere proximity to one another of words like "bacon", "kazoo" and "Manama" was sufficiently hilarious to bring down the house. Ross Noble is, we are frequently told, a surreal comedian. His new show certainly contains enough references to "dwarves in sombreros" and "shaven suicide monkeys" to ensure that its title, Nonsensory Overload, comfortably adheres to the terms of the Trade Descriptions Act. As befits a show with a get-out clause Read more ...

Celebrity Autobiography, like most of the world’s best ideas, is simple yet inspired. Eugene Pack’s creation, developed with Dayle Reyfel, was first seen in Los Angeles three years ago, then in New York and other American cities, and was a sellout hit at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. Both creators, along with a bunch of actors and comics, appeared last night to read from various celebrities’ autobiographies. That’s all it is, folks.Except, of course, it isn’t. For Pack, Reyfel and co, reading verbatim from works by, among others, Britney Spears, Eminem, Diana Ross, David Cassidy and Tommy Lee Read more ...

It will come as no surprise that a critic should instantly become a fan of a comic whose debut show at the Edinburgh Fringe (for which Alun Cochrane received a Perrier Award nomination) was a show titled My Favourite Words in My Best Stories. Anyone who loves words is a hit with me - we’re ploughing the same furrow after all, just in different ways.In fact, the first time I tried to see that show in 2004 I was the only person at a London preview; there had been a misunderstanding between his promoters and the venue, and Cochrane and I had turned up for a gig that no one else knew was Read more ...

It takes a very talented comic indeed to warm the main room at the Leicester Square Theatre, a venue that is situated beneath a Catholic church and which, vampire-like, can suck the life out of even the most buoyant of audiences. Fortunately, Jason Byrne has enough energy to wake the dead or, in this case, a few hundred damp souls who have come in from a rainy London town outside.The Irish comic starts his show as he means to go on - with the gags coming apace and a delightfully surreal set-up that involves Davina McCall exercise steppers and skipping ropes. Byrne’s greatest skill is riffing Read more ...