Comedy
theartsdesk
With the lightning speed of online delivery, there is still masses of time to select the best and most enjoyable presents for Christmas, thanks to the taste and wisdom of theartsdesk's pack of writers. With battered guitars, Belgian cartoons, Pacino's Shylock on Broadway, Australian festivals, Ballets Russes scarves, boomboxes, special edition CDs, advance booking on next year's hot shows, a subscription to The New Yorker and commissioning a portrait by a top artist among the cornucopia of suggested desirables, there really is something for everyone and for every purse. Kieron Tyler Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Comedy is a funny old thing: what makes one person helpless with laughter can leave another resolutely unmoved, which generally has less to do with the quality of the material, and more to do with the individual’s sense of humour. But among the following selection of DVDs - covering comedy from observational and bloke-next-door to surreal and fantastical - there is likely to be something that tickles your fancy, or better still your funny bone.
Lee Mack: Going Out, Anchor Bay Entertainment
When I watched this show live I wanted Lee Mack to stop for a moment in his relentless gagfest just so Read more ...
Veronica Lee
In the course of his decade-long career Jason Manford has benefited from the British public’s appetite (eagerly fed by television producers) for inoffensive and family-friendly comics. Similar stand-ups, for instance Michael McIntyre and Peter Kay, have even become millionaires by providing this kind of comedy, and until recently there was no reason to believe that Manford was going to do anything other than follow in their footsteps, particularly after he was made co-host of BBC One’s The One Show, which regularly pulls in more than four million viewers. Television exposure like that, as any Read more ...
howard.male
There’s a surreal sitcom waiting to be written about the often-told story of when Charlie Higson and Paul Whitehouse were Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie’s plasterers for a while in the early 1980s. Here’s the pitch: F and L would play caricatures of themselves in the mould of the posh twits they played in Blackadder, and – for extra comic frisson – H and W would play it straight while appearing (as the story goes) naturally funnier than their professional Oxbridge comedy-writing superiors.If the old wags themselves didn’t have the time or inclination to knock up six episodes, The IT Crowd Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Jon Richardson’s first full-length show in 2007, Spatula Pad, was about the seemingly unpromising subject of having obsessive compulsive disorder, and being a misanthrope to boot. But it deservedly gained him an If.Comedy Award Best Newcomer nomination, which was followed by another in the main category of the Edinburgh Comedy Awards for last year’s show, This Guy at Night, about how his perfectionism has ruined his relationships.Since then, Richardson has become a regular guest on television panel shows, where his quick wit and engaging personality are a winning combination, and now he’s Read more ...
Veronica Lee
By chance, two comics with a penchant for rock‘n’roll have been strutting their stuff at opposite ends of the capital in the same week. First, Bolton funnyman Peter Kay was giving it his all on stage at the O2 on the Greenwich peninsula, and now Bill Bailey begins a two-month-long residency at the Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End. Music buffs both - but in Bailey’s case there are no air guitars as he’s an accomplished musician, and the stage is filled with stringed instruments and keyboards.But it would be slightly misleading to describe Bailey as a musical comic, as a large part of his act Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Only part-way through a mammoth stadium tour that began last April and continues until next autumn (and which he insists will end on 15 October at the MEN Arena in Manchester, where he once worked as an usher), Peter Kay is still having to add dates as they sell out almost the instant they're announced. He’s a phenomenon that even Michael McIntyre and Jimmy Carr - no slouches in stadium-show sales themselves - must be envious of.I must confess myself a huge fan, and last night it was a real pleasure to see Kay live for the first time in several years at the O2 (formerly the Millennium Dome). Read more ...
judith.flanders
It feels a little like AA: "My name is Judith Flanders, and I am a Doonesbury addict." This month marks the 40th anniversary of Garry Trudeau’s strip – part political satire, part Baby-Boomer comfort zone, all comic, all fine graphic design. And I have been reading it for 38 of those 40 years, to my surprise. I came across the first book when I was 12, and although the main satire – Vietnam – entirely passed me by, I was enchanted with this world of grown-up mockery.I have since grown up with Mike, B D, Joanie and friends – in fact, I see them daily; far more often than I see most of Read more ...
Veronica Lee
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 ...
kate.bassett
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 ...
Ismene Brown
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 ...
Jasper Rees
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 ...