Comedy Buzz
Brighton Comedy Festival, 4-20 OctoberTuesday, 17 September 2013
Tickets are now on sale for the Brighton Comedy Festival (4-20 October), which takes place in several venues in the South Coast town. Read more... |
Altitude Festival 2013Wednesday, 20 February 2013
The sixth Altitude Festival takes place on March 18-22. The festival of Alpine comedy started in 2008 when Marcus Brigstocke decided to combine his day job with the family's snowboarding holiday and invited a few of his comedy mates to join him in performing in Méribel in France while skiing or snowboarding (some of them for the first time, which made for good comedy in itself). Read more... |
Glasgow International Comedy Festival 2013 launchedWednesday, 30 January 2013
The line-up for this year's Glasgow International Comedy Festival has been announced. The festival, now in its 11th year, takes place 14-31 March with 411 show at 46 venues in Scotland's second city. Read more... |
Black Cat CabaretThursday, 10 January 2013
A new Friday-night cabaret club opens tomorrow at the fabled Café de Paris in London's Leicester Square. The Grade II-listed venue's subterranean ballroom, where Marlene Dietrich, Frank Sinatra and Noël Coward once performed, will be home to Black Cat Cabaret, a weekly show of music, comedy, striptease and magic. Read more... |
Thinking of Something Funny: Eric Sykes, 1923-2012Wednesday, 04 July 2012
“One never consciously observes. The only people who consciously observe are policemen and undercover agents.” Eric Sykes, who has died at the age of 89, was the last of the great vaudevilleans. When I met him in the late 1990s, he was already totally deaf and largely blind, and somehow continued to work and remain remarkably chipper with it. He had his first ear operation in 1952, another a decade later, whereafter he wore a hearing aid camouflaged as a pair of thick-rimmed glasses. Read more... |
Edinburgh Comedy Awards winnersSaturday, 27 August 2011
The winners of the 2011 Foster's Edinburgh Comedy Awards have been announced. The main award, worth £10,000, went to Adam Riches for his anarchic and intensely physical show Bring Me the Head of Adam Riches; the best newcomer award, worth £5,000, went to... Read more... |
Bafta TV Awards 2011Sunday, 22 May 2011
Crikey, no gongs whatsoever for ITV1's Downton Abbey, but you can't grumble about Sherlock lifting the Best Drama Series award at last night's Baftas. Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss's ingenious update of Conan Doyle for BBC One was one of 2010's telly highlights, and you might have thought it would have earned the Leading Actor award for Benedict Cumberbatch. Read more... |
Boxing Day Bloat: theartsdesk recommendsSaturday, 25 December 2010
Yesterday was yesterday. Today there's the rest of the week. What are the options? You could go to the shops and exchange all your presents, or you could pursue something more in the cultural line. To which end, theartsdesk is delighted to propose some suggestions. Our writers strongly recommend that you do one or more of the following while opportunity knocks. ENGLANDRead more... |
Doonesbury: The 40th AnniversaryTuesday, 02 November 2010
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... Read more... |
Foster's Edinburgh Comedy Awards: and the winners are...Monday, 30 August 2010
In a terrific year for comedy at the Fringe, the winners of the 2010 Foster's Edinburgh Comedy Awards (formerly the Perriers) are Russell Kane, Roisin Conaty and Bo Burnham. The prizes - cheques for £10,000, £5,000 and £5,000 - were presented to the three comedians on Saturday in the Spiegel Tent in George Square in a celebration of 30 years of these awards. Read more... |
Pages
latest in today
A Sherlock Carol, Marylebone Theatre review – merry, but mir...
It’s an elementary fact that Dickens sells at this time of year — look at all the perennial Christmas Carols sprouting up everywhere. But...
Macbeth, The Depot, Liverpool review - Ralph Fiennes leads a...
Next door to the beautiful Art Deco Littlewoods Pools Building, nearly 30 years standing derelict, a set of grey sheds stand, a seat of...
Peter Pan Goes Wrong, Lyric Theatre review - adult panto del...
Mischief Theatre set themselves a big challenge when they evolved their brand of knowing slapstick. And not just about how to destroy...
Queendom review - an LGBTQ+ performance artist takes to the...
It takes a brave or a foolhardy person to walk the streets wearing almost nothing but barbed wire and platform shoes, especially when the occasion...
Album: Ghost Woman - Hindsight Is 50/50
Ghost Woman’s 2022 self-titled album and this January’s swift follow-up Anne, If were both fairly laidback and spaced out affairs, with...
The House of Bernarda Alba, Lyttleton Theatre review - dazzl...
Rebecca Frecknall opened 2023 with a youthful, visceral, and brutal Streetcar Named Desire at The Almeida; she ends it with...
Album: Trevor Horn - Echoes: Ancient & Modern
A deathless trend in pop is taking great songs, slowing them down, doing orchestral versions, or rendering them raw acoustic. This, ostensibly,...
Odyssey: A Heroic Pantomime, Charles Court Opera, Jermyn Str...
This is the show that launched a thousand puns, mostly ancient-Greek-oriented, and just as many corny rhymes, all delivered with high energy and...
Grosvenor, Park, Ridout, Soltani, Wigmore Hall review - cham...
Frank Bridge’s Phantasie Piano Quartet was astutely described by his student Benjamin Britten as “Brahms tempered with Fauré”, so it made...
Album: Peter Gabriel - I/O
Some 28 years in gestation, Peter Gabriel’s eighth studio album of wholly original songs – his first since 2002’s Up...