Comedy
Veronica Lee
‘'You must see this show!” “You must not go to this show!” Faced with those exhortations from friends and colleagues who had already seen (and been quite shocked by) it, I of course go to Kim Noble Will Die at the Soho Theatre. I was trepidatious because they told me it includes film of him consuming dog food, vomiting, self-harming and doing an awful lot of ejaculating - not my idea of a chucklesome evening. But Kim Noble was once half of the award-winning, darkly surreal duo Noble and Silver (with Stuart Silver), who had several years of success at the Edinburgh Fringe, and this is his Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It’s a rare show that has every critic reaching for the superlatives and wishing they could award six stars out of five, but Pajama Men’s The Last Stand to Reason did that at the Edinburgh Fringe earlier this year earlier this year. Pajama Men consists of Mark Chavez and Shenoah Allen, two thirtysomething men from Albuquerque, New Mexico who, in a remarkable display of vocal and physical dexterity, create a world so detailed, so fully, beautifully and comically realised that it’s astonishing to note they do it with the aid of just two chairs and occasional music from the onstage Kevin Hume. Read more ...
Veronica Lee
November’s comedy releases come just in time for the festive season - those stockings won’t fill themselves, you know. From feelgood humour to thoughtful (and very funny, too) discourses of race, sex and class, there's a comedy turn recorded live to suit all tastes. There are some crackers available and here’s a selection of the best on offer.Chris Rock, Kill the Messenger (Warner Bros)
The American self-styled hip-hop comedian has long since attained worldwide stardom, both through stand-up and film, and this DVD, filmed in New York, London and Johannesburg on his 2008 world tour, is Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Let’s be kind to Eddie Izzard. The guy has not long finished running 43 marathons in 51 days in aid of Sport Relief and the undeniably noble effort would take the puff out of anyone. And just the day before this show, he had run a half marathon further along the South Coast from Eastbourne to his childhood home town of Bexhill-on-Sea to reopen their refurbished museum. So maybe the lacklustre performance I saw at the cavernous Brighton Centre was one-off and he’ll be back on form for the rest of his tour.Izzard’s trademark comedy (“bollocks with more bollocks on top”, as he calls it) is Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Reginald D Hunter wants us to know from the off that he will be using the “n” word in his show. A lot. Well, there’s a clue in the show’s title, The Only Apple in the Garden of Eden and Niggas, but that’s rather misleading; it’s less a description and more an in-joke from the time an earlier show’s posters (which also included it) were banned on the London Underground. So now he puts a rude word in the title of most of his shows and it pretty much indicates the Southerner’s style: punchy exposition tempered by knowing irony.Hunter first came to the UK study at Rada and the actorly training Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
“Green Wing, but set in a university” is one of those useful handles that reviewers were always going to grasp when discussing Victoria Pile’s new improvised ensemble comedy, Campus, the opening try-out in Channel 4’s new Comedy Showcase season of sitcom pilots. For once, the handy nut-shell description is spot on. Campus is precisely that: Green Wing, but set in a university – and as a fan of Green Wing I should feel that that is good thing. However I’m not sure the formula has survived the relocation from hospital to campus.For one thing, they are such different – almost opposite - Read more ...
kat.brown
Firstly, no, Tom Wrigglesworth's Open Return Letter to Richard Branson isn’t that letter. His epistle is not to be confused with Oliver Beale’s, whose email to the Virgin boss complaining about the food on a Virgin flight went viral last year. The Sheffield-born comic, currently appearing at the Soho Theatre in London, set about an altogether more decent-hearted campaign after witnessing some gross unfairness meted out to an elderly passenger on a Virgin train journey last autumn.Wrigglesworth was nearly arrested when he organised a train-wide whip-round after a grandmother was fined £115 by Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Stephen K Amos, although a mightily talented comic, doesn’t make a critic’s job easy. His new show, The Feelgood Factor, does indeed offer that and leaves everybody in the Churchill Theatre in Bromley in a happy mood (and many of them planning to buy him a pint afterwards), but unless I quoted reams of his delivery I couldn’t actually describe what the show is about, other than making people laugh. A lot.That’s not a criticism; it’s just that over the past decade or so we have come to expect comics to have themed shows with a narrative rather than simply to tell jokes with punchlines, one Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It’s a brave comic who declares on stage every night that he would like to see a cute television presenter die in a horrific accident (as nearly happened to Top Gear’s Richard Hammond in 2006). But declares it Stewart Lee does and, for good measure, he also disses a fellow comedian while he’s at it.Lee’s style is almost professorial; he lays out his material slowly, deliberately in a low, even voice and fashions a joke that may not get its payoff until several minutes later. He even deconstructs his material at times or condescendingly berates the audience for not getting the point quickly Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Dylan Moran is, as the ethnic stereotype would have it, a great storyteller. The Irishman doesn’t tell jokes with punchlines as such, rather he rambles on a bit and sort of makes his points along the way. As entertainment, then, his latest show, What It Is, is the sort where one smiles a lot rather than laughs out loud.If that sounds undynamic, it is. Moran shambles on stage at the Apollo Theatre, hair already tousled and a glass of red wine in hand, but now minus the ever present cigarette of his formative comedy years, when he won plaudits galore, including the prestigious Perrier award at Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Alastair McGowan’s larynx is an amazing thing; it allows him to do 120 voices in 120 minutes during his solo touring show, The One and Many..., which I saw at Journal Tyne Theatre in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Not all the impressions are spot-on and there’s an over-reliance on sport-related material, but this is a tour-de-force of the impressionist’s artMany of his characters are familiar from his television show The Big Impression which he performed with sometime partner and comic foil Ronni Ancona. His David Beckham (and Victoria, which is a new voice) continues to be a delight, while his ex- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Of course there’ll be no certain way of knowing whether the ensuing rave is heartfelt. Four years ago Tim Minchin, fresh off the plane from Down Under, burst onto the Edinburgh Fringe to be greeted by a short sharp one-star crit from a Guardian reviewer who had possibly got out of the wrong side of the bed. Where a regular stand-up would look horribly petulant to bear such a public grudge, Minchin put his riposte in song, because he has that near-unique facility. Very amusing it is too, as well as a cast-iron insurance policy against further slatings. No journalist has any desire to be Read more ...