Comedy Reviews

Edinburgh Fringe: Jason Cook/ Cul de Sac/ Fear of a Brown Planet

Veronica Lee Tuesday, 16 August 2011

Jason Cook: the comic has masterly audience skills

Jason Cook has masterly audience skills, and he needed them all the night I saw him. A middle-aged teacher (who really should know better), whose refreshment clearly led her to the delusion that she was the person people had paid to see, kept interrupting. Even the engaging and unfailingly polite Geordie comic's patience was wearing thin, but he constantly bested her and got on with the job of making us laugh.

Edinburgh Fringe: Glenn Wool/ Jerry Sadowitz/ Ford and Akram

theartsdesk Sunday, 14 August 2011

The Canadian is making a welcome return to the Fringe after a few years away and the break has served him well, as he's been doing a bit of travelling, and it was an incident when he flew to Indonesia that provides the starting point - and beautifully conceived climax - to No Lands Man.

BBC Proms: Tim Minchin, Kit and the Widow, Beardyman, BBC Concert Orchestra

Jasper Rees Saturday, 13 August 2011

It has been, we can safely agree, a truly terrible week. Art, culture, call it what you will, is unequal to the task of diagnosing a nation’s ills, let alone curing them. But on a night such as the inaugural Comedy Prom, it comes equipped with healing balm. This evening was maybe not perfect. There were wrinkles, little bits here and there that didn’t quite work. But the Saturday night that the BBC Proms gave over to the business of laughter could not have been more opportune.

Comment

Edinburgh Fringe: Jackie Leven/ Jen Brister/ Doris Day Can F**k Off

theartsdesk Saturday, 13 August 2011

Physically reduced he may have been, but his talents were as expansive as ever, and more than capable of holding a small room captivated with just voice and guitar.

Edinburgh Fringe: Dana Alexander/ A Sentimental Journey/ Dog-Eared Collective

Veronica Lee Thursday, 11 August 2011

Dana Alexander: the Canadian makes good comedy out of her Jamaican/American/British family

After 12 years in the business, Dana Alexander, an ebullient and instantly likeable presence on stage, is still the only black woman on the Canadian comedy circuit. Not that her ethnicity is Alexander's pre-occupation – it most definitely isn't – but it does play a part in her act.

Edinburgh Fringe: Lounge Room Confabulators/ Andi Osho/ Matthew Crosby

Veronica Lee Wednesday, 10 August 2011

Stuart Bowden and Will Greenway tell tall stories in your living room

Imagine that Tim Burton, or some other great modern-day storyteller of your choice, knocks at your door and asks if he can come into your living room for an hour to tell some fantastical stories. You would get some beers in and friends around pronto, right? Well, the Lounge Room Confabulators, a duo from Australia who tell stories in the Burton...

Edinburgh Fringe: Margaret Cho/ The Wheel/ Jessica Forteskew

Veronica Lee Tuesday, 09 August 2011

Margaret Cho, Assembly ****

Margaret Cho is back, and how. Ten years away from the Fringe, the American-Korean bisexual - “I'm just greedy, I guess” - is a little softer around the edges maybe, but still as funny. With her lefty humour, punctuated by lots of adult content, she is waspish, but definitely not Waspish.

Edinburgh Fringe: The Monster in the Hall/ Joel Dommett/ Katherine Ryan

Veronica Lee Monday, 08 August 2011

'The Monster in the Hall': 'The play is performed by four actors, who also form a sort of Greek chorus made flesh as a 1960s girls group, The Fabulous Duckettes'

The Monster in the Hall, Traverse ****

David Greig's indie comedy musical, first performed at Glasgow's Citizens Theatre at the end of last year, is a bright and inventive four-hander about a 16-year-old girl struggling to keep everything together. Duck Macatarsney (Gemma McElhinny), who writes escapist stories in her room, cares for her biker dad, known as Duke, who suffers from multiple sclerosis. At the beginning of the play Duke (Keith Macpherson) is struck blind.

Sam Simmons, Soho Theatre

Kate Bassett Sunday, 24 July 2011

Sam Simmons: the award-winning Australian gives a deliberately shamateur performance

The award-winning Australian comedian Sam Simmons is shuffling around in a pair of bread loaves. He's wearing them like slippers and trying to take bites out of them at the same time. Indeed, his tremendously silly show, Fail, is essentially a shambles. This is the overarching joke: it's his absurd non-sequiturs and his tongue-in-cheek, shamateur performance style that reduce his audience to spasms of laughter.

theartsdesk at the Latitude Festival: Smorgasbord in Suffolk

David Cheal Tuesday, 19 July 2011

Latitude: Well run, pleasant, helpful, and with the customary array of attractively coloured sheep

Latitude: this four-day event in the attractive environs of Henham Park, near Southwold, is, as its slogan says, “more than just a music festival”. Quite so. But how to review such a groaning cultural smorgasbord? This year, rather than delivering an indigestible wodge of words, I thought I’d take a slightly different approach; thus my account of my four days in Suffolk is divided into thematic sections which correspond only roughly to the festival’s own creative categorisations. So...