Comedy
Adam Sweeting
American critics have been fanfaring Modern Family as something of a sitcom revolution for its wit, intelligence and the cast's all-round expertise. It might take longer to grow a British fanbase, because you need a few spins around the circuit before its contours start to feel familiar, but then suddenly the lights go on and revelation ensues.
Initially, it looks like it should be called Modern Families. There's grouchy senior citizen Jay (Ed O'Neill) and his young Colombian wife Gloria (the scorchio Sofia Vergara), gay couple Mitchell and Cameron, and "conventional" parents-with-kids Phil Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Anyone looking for a novel way into their PhD on how the British like to be entertained would do well to sit in the audience of the live version of Grumpy Old Women, a successful spin-off from the BBC television series where celebby femmes d’un certain age sit and moan about whatever takes their fancy. Students of British social mores will learn that what Brits love more than anything is a good old moan - and will even pay to hear someone else do it for them.One assumes that the gripes expressed on the TV version are the contributors’ own, but on stage it’s a scripted piece by Judith Holder Read more ...
Veronica Lee
When Al Murray started doing his Pub Landlord character in the mid-1990s, many (including me) thought it was an invention of comic genius. The sad, deluded Essex Man, railing against the modern world and cuckolded by a Frenchman, was a ridiculous xenophobe and someone for whom a teary-eyed version of dear old Blighty existed in a kind of mental sepia. It was a masterclass in subtlety, suggestion and irony.The comedy was clever, layered and deep in pathos, but such knowing material was never going to succeed when Sky TV came calling and the character was given his own sitcom. The delicious Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It’s a big ask for any performer to take on a role that was written specially for another actor, but Diana Vickers’ supporters from her appearances in last year’s X Factor on ITV will be pleased to learn that she acquits herself very well indeed. She is Little Voice in Terry Johnson’s pleasing revival of Jim Cartwright’s The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, which began life in the National’s Cottesloe Theatre in 1992 with Jane Horrocks in the title role.Horrocks' uncanny ability to impersonate several divas, from Shirley Bassey and Gracie Fields to Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland, formed the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
What are the politics of comedy? The great thing about Trevor Griffiths's 1975 classic, Comedians, which opened last night in a solid revival directed by Sean Holmes, is that this subject is debated with grace as well as humour. As six apprentice comedians attend a night class run by the veteran stand-up Eddie Waters, they find that their hunger for stardom clashes with his desire to use comedy to make a difference, to change society. Is comedy just a piece of harmless fun, or can it be used as a tool for social engineering?Played by Matthew Kelly, Waters comes across as avuncular, hurt and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The watertight theory behind the Credit Crunch Cabaret is that we all need cheering up, above all on Monday nights. Frank Skinner compered 10 of these start-the-week-for-a-tenner variety nights earlier in the year. He returned last night for another 10-Monday stint. Variety was still on the agenda: it’s never not going to be the case that in a bill with four acts, some are going to be funnier than others. Much funnier.Skinner noted that there were some empty seats near the front, a possible indication that the financial downturn is itself on the wane. He still found more than enough Read more ...
Veronica Lee
“Let’s start with ‘I’m so lonely’,” says Simon Amstell at the top of his show, Do Nothing. As an opening line for most comedy evenings, that would be about as enticing as the oyster special at the Slurry Pond Inn but thankfully the ex-host of BBC’s Never Mind the Buzzcocks serves up an evening as witty as it is intellectually nutritious.Amstell’s previous stand-up shows have certainly been full of erudition, but some critics have complained they lacked in passion. Well he more than addresses that criticism here, as his emotions are often laid bare and his soul well and truly searched. If that Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“Got a mortgage.” Thus spake Michael McIntyre last night. It’s an article of faith for McIntyre - an all but unique selling point - that he is one of us. He wears a suit to work and doesn’t think about al-Qaeda that much. How many other comedians do you come across who remind you even vaguely of you? Where most stand-ups are weird or ugly or angry or hairy or epically rude (or all of the above), McIntyre is groundbreakingly normal, boy-next-door bourgeois. The jokes are all about the things all of us do - in the shops, in the kitchen, the bedroom. But not in the office. In what other Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Jan Ravens is probably best known for several series of Dead Ringers, broadcast first on Radio 4 then BBC2, when she voiced all the female characters from Kirsty Wark and Fiona Bruce to Ann Widdecombe and Nigella Lawson. Before that she was part of the Spitting Image team, appeared on Alexei Sayle's Stuff and in sitcoms No Frills and The Grimleys. She has also appeared in 2DTV and Alastair McGowan's Big Impression.She was a member of Cambridge Footlights and directed the The Cellar Tapes, the revue whose cast included Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Tony Slattery and Emma Thompson and which was Read more ...
Veronica Lee
For my money, Andy Parsons is by some distance the best panellist on BBC2’s Mock the Week - not that you would know it from the editing, which appears to be in thrall to that shouty Scottish bloke. Parsons is quick, witty, clever and has a command of current affairs that only MTW host Dara O Briain can match. What a pleasure, then, to see him live, commanding the audience’s rapt and thoroughly entertained attention in a show that lasted more than two hours, but which just flew by.Parsons, with his shaven head and Estuary vowels, could be mistaken for a London cabbie but is in fact a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
“He’s a naughty lad, isn’t he?” said an elderly lady to her husband as they left Julian Clary’s show, Lord of the Mince, which had numerous references to gay sexual practices. The remark wasn’t made in anger, mind, but with a smile on both their faces - and that’s a clue as to why Clary gets away with some unbelievably smutty material. As with many a camp gay comic, from Frankie Howerd and Larry Grayson to, more recently, Graham Norton and Paul O’Grady, the British public just love him.Clary’s fans fall, I imagine, into two distinct categories; those who know him as a comic, and those who Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The departure from the Oval Office of George W Bush was a catalyst for much street festivity over the water, for inappropriate hugging of strangers and random multi-ethnic high-fiving. Of course whole tranches of the all-American demographic were somehow able to contain their excitement at the coming of Obama – among them oil profiteers, health insurers, people whose recreation includes shooting other people in the head. But none mourn Dubya like American comedians. And no American comedian mourns him more than Rich Hall. There aren’t so many jokes in the audacity of hope.So where does a Read more ...