comedians
Aleks Sierz
Success smells sweet. The Bridge Theatre’s pioneering season of one-person plays continues with sell-out performances of David Hare’s Beat the Devil and Fuel’s production of Inua Ellams’s An Evening with an Immigrant, with both having their runs extended. And, next month, this venue is also venturing out beyond the M25: two of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads – Imelda Staunton in A Lady of Letters and Maxine Peake in Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet – will visit Sheffield Theatres and Leeds Playhouse (where Rochenda Sandall will also perform Bennett’s Outside Dog). Meanwhile, back at base, last week Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Seth Rogen offers up double the laughs by taking on both lead roles in a time-hopping, Rip-Van-Winkle screwball comedy, but with an oddly mixed conservative message about the merits of family and religion.The screenplay is based on a four-part New Yorker short story called Sell-Out by Simon Rich. That piece of writing along with other short stories earned him a reputation as a modern-day PG Wodehouse, not to mention being SNL’s youngest ever writer and polishing scripts for Pixar. Rich’s writing is sharp, often high-concept, and very, very funny. But the story has lost some of its Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The first series of What We Do in the Shadows, Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi’s mockumentary about vampires in Staten Island (a TV spin-off from their cult New Zealand-located film) was a joy, and although it’s a hard act to follow, it’s delicious to be reacquainted with these timeless Transylvanian transplants and their mission to conquer the Americas. At least, that’s what their master, a crumbling vampire baron, has told them to do. Trouble is, as Laszlo (plummy-voiced Matt Berry; Toast of London, The IT Crowd) noted in the last series, the New World is “fucking massive”. Best stick to Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
The master of crowd-pleasing comedy, Judd Apatow, returns with another on-brand tale of arrested development with The King of Staten Island. While it's near his signature anarchic charm, this comedy-drama shows that even a veteran director/writer/producer like Apatow has room for growth. Perhaps Apatow's development is down to his collaboration with 26-year-old SNL comedian and Staten Island native Pete Davidson, who combines his writing and acting talents to explore how he came to terms with losing his firefighter father during 9/11. Set in the working-class world of Staten Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Simon Bird's feature film debut as a director is a gentle, warm-hearted look at a mother and son's strained relationship as they are forced to spend the summer holidays together when the teenager's dad cruelly cancels a trip to see him and his pregnant, much younger wife in Florida.Days of the Bagnold Summer started life as Joff Winterhart's graphic novel, and Bird's wife, Lisa Owens, has adapted it for the screen. It has a slow-moving, elegiac quality as we see Sue Bagnold (the ever-wonderful Monica Dolan) and 15-year-old heavy-metal fan Daniel (Earl Cave, son of Nick, note-perfect as the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Tina Fey and Robert Carlock’s hit comedy Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (Netflix) ended its fourth series in January last year, but this belated interactive special suggested there could be new life in it yet. Summarising Unbreakable… is possible but almost meaningless – “after 15 years imprisoned in an Indiana doomsday cult, Kimmy moves to New York, makes some very eccentric friends and becomes an inspirational children’s author” – but the infinite elasticity of the concept means that anything can happen.And so it proved here, as we rejoined Kimmy (Ellie Kemper) as she prepared to marry Prince Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The odd-couple comedy duo is a time-tested concept, and Rob Beckett and Romesh Ranganathan have discovered a chemistry that works. Rob is the giggling excitable one, while Romesh, aided by a sleepy right eye which conveys a sense of harsh judgmentalism, adds a blast of deadpan scepticism.Previously, the pair have squared up to such topics as Usain Bolt, fashion and country music, but they started this second series (Sky 1) with a leap off a very high cliff. They decided they were going to perform in a ballet, and persuaded Birmingham Royal Ballet to let them have a go at appearing in Swan Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Creating the opening episode of a new comedy series is like flipping pancakes with one hand while playing the Moonlight Sonata with the other. You have to introduce your characters and invent the world they live in, while squeezing in enough plot to keep the action moving.So high-fives to Sophie Willan, the first recipient of the BBC's Caroline Aherne writing bursary, for getting Alma’s Not Normal (BBC Two) off to a flyer. It’s a story of grungy, low-life Bolton, peopled with characters teetering between tragedy and farce. Willan plays Alma, the unemployed and barely educated daughter of drug Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
Armchair theatre-lovers rejoice. During the lockdown, the National Theatre is streaming a selection of its past hits for free for one week at a time. These shows, originally filmed as part of the flagship’s NT Live project (which broadcast beautifully produced recordings of shows to local cinemas nationwide and abroad), are now available on its YouTube channel. The first is Richard Bean’s gloriously silly farce, One Man, Two Guvnors, starring the irrepressible and Tony-award winning James Corden.Based on Carlo Goldoni’s 1746 Commedia dell’Arte classic, The Servant of Two Masters, Bean’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This was the third collaboration between Dave and the mental health charity CALM (Comedy Against Living Miserably), hosted at EartH in Dalston by Joel Dommett. Its non-standard format comprised chunks of performances by the featured standup comics, intercut with the performers discussing what their material says about mental health.It’s a pressing issue and this is a commendable initiative, but the stilted structure meant the acts never really worked up a head of steam. Just as they began to get going onstage, we would cut away to another dollop of discussion and the momentum was lost. It Read more ...
Jill Chuah Masters
“I am not intense.” That declaration arrives early in Feel Good, the new Channel 4 and Netflix romantic comedy fronted by comedian Mae Martin, who plays a fictionalised version of herself. Over Mae’s shoulder, we see a literal trash fire. She’s lit up the evidence of a past drug addiction. It smoulders in the background while she smoulders in the front.This scene is Feel Good in miniature: it encapsulates Martin's brand of vulnerable, quirky comedy, pinned to her appeal as a character and a creator. The series is easy to watch and easy to like. Still, Feel Good has a hindrance. For a Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The multi-talented Kal Penn (Harold and Kumar, Designated Survivor, House) took a two-year acting sabbatical in 2009 to work for the Obama administration. So he is, in theory, ideally placed to co-create, with Matt Murray, a semi-political TV sitcom about a New York City councillor.Councilman Garrett Modi (Modi is actually Penn’s real name) lets partying with Wall Street douchebags go to his head, is busted for driving on the expressway under the influence, then vomits on a police car and attempts to bribe the cops for a billion dollars. Of course, this goes viral and he’s soon pitching up Read more ...