comedy reviews
Veronica Lee

Reginald D Hunter drops the n-bomb near the top of the show. He means no offence, he tells the audience, but it's the vernacular where he comes from in Georgia. And besides, using that word, as well as expressing some trenchant opinions about the differences between men and women, and the politics of race, has sort of become Hunter's calling card.

Thomas H. Green

The Komedia is a Brighton Institution and celebrates its birthday tonight in a suitably raucous fashion. The Komedia began in 1994, founded by the directors of the Umbrella Theatre Company, and styled on the cabaret spaces they’d experienced touring Europe. It moved to its current premises in 1999, turning a ramshackle labyrinthine building that housed a hippy-style market (before that a Tesco) into a labyrinthine building housing a bar-venue-cinema complex, with the central hub in the large basement.

Veronica Lee

Mark Thomas issues a health warning for Check-Up: Our NHS at 70  at Battersea Arts Centre  – “This show contains swearing, a video of an operation on a stomach and a description of being in A&E when a patient dies.” Indeed it does, but it also contains a heartfelt love letter to the health service Thomas was born in and, as a lifelong socialist, hopes to die in. But as he points to creeping commercialisation, what are the chances of that being so?

Veronica Lee

A brain tumour isn't usually the subject of a comedy show but Britney, written and performed by comedy duo Charly Clive and Ellen Robertson, is just that. It's “the true story of what happens to two best friends when one of them [Clive] gets a brain tumour” – the size of a golf ball, her father helpfully pointed out.

Veronica Lee

Tommy Tiernan is something of an institution in his native Ireland, as a stand-up comic, newspaper columnist, sometime chat show host and full-time controversialist. Now his appearance as Da Gerry in Channel 4's Derry Girls has brought him to a wider audience – both geographically and generationally – and deservedly so.

Veronica Lee

Angela Barnes is one of life’s pessimists, she tells us at the top of the hour, but she’s trying not to be so world-weary, and to turn negatives into positives. And, while there’s so much awfulness going on around us, why not try to lighten the mood a little?

Veronica Lee

Most people in the UK know American actor and stand-up Aziz Ansari from Parks and Recreation, where he played the sarcastic and underachieving local government official Tom Haverford. Comedy fans will also know him as a successful club comic on both US coasts, and from his Netflix specials.

Veronica Lee

Ed Gamble starts the hour by telling us why his latest show is called Blizzard; he and a bunch of comic friends we stranded in New York by bad weather and it made the news - yet, strangely, the headline wasn’t a play on his name - a gift for hacks - but on the monicker of one of his mates. Cue faux outrage.

Veronica Lee

Have you ever felt the hot shame of saying or doing the wrong thing? Not just embarrassment – that's for amateurs, says Lou Sanders in her wonderfully honest and revealing show Shame Pig, in which she essays some of her life's red-faced moments. Embarrassment is fleeting and lends itself to a good anecdote (or a fine joke in a stand-up set), she says, while shame is a much more corrosive emotion, and one that young women in particular burden themselves with unnecessarily.

Veronica Lee

Sheeps, the sketch comedy threesome, had never really gone away but when they performed Live and Loud Selfie Sex Harry Potter at the Edinburgh Fringe last year after a four-year absence, it was called a comeback. More a welcome reunion, as its members – Liam Williams, Daran Johnson and Alastair Roberts – had been busy doing solo projects.

The show, which they have brought to the Soho Theatre for a short run, is in the same vein as their previous work – original and intelligent sketch comedy with a touch of edginess and the surreal.