thu 28/03/2024

sketch comedy

Edinburgh Fringe: Sam Simmons/ Totally Tom/ Humphrey Ker/ Nick Helm

Sam Simmons, Gilded Balloon **** Sam Simmons clocks a young girl in the front row and stops the show. “How old are you?” the Aussie comic asks. “Ten,” comes the reply, and he suggests to her mother that this may not be the show for them, so...

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Edinburgh Fringe: Kieran and the Joes/ Conor O'Toole/ Tom Allen/ Kate Smurthwaite

Kieran and the Joes: clean-cut comics with a dark side

Kieran and the Joes are a three-man sketch group (Kieran Hodgson, Joe Markham and Joe Parham, working with co-writer Tom Meltzer) who are young, personable and very neatly dressed in shirts and ties - but while they may appear clean...

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Edinburgh Fringe: Adam Riches/ Kristin Hersh

From the moment Adam Riches bursts onto the stage, spewing his business cards around as a manic showbiz agent who wants to sign up everyone and everything - including even the venue's walls and floor - this is a show of hyper energy and absurdist...

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Edinburgh Fringe: Tiffany Stevenson/ Carl Donnelly/ The Two Wrongies

Tiffany Stevenson ★★★★The comic is currently appearing on Show Me the Funny on ITV, where her smily disposition is a welcome antidote to some of the sneery critics they have mustered. There’s boyfriend stuff in Cavewoman but Stevenson also delivers...

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Edinburgh Fringe: The Cave Singers/ The Real MacGuffins/ An Instinct for Kindness

The Cave Singers: authentically hairy three-piece from Seattle

A three-piece hailing from Seattle and its environs, The Cave Singers are an authentically hairy proposition. With his tweed hat and red beard, at this Edge festival gig singer Pete Quirk looked like a cross between the late Robin Cook and a stray...

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Edinburgh Fringe: DeAnne Smith/ A Slow Air/ Dregs

DeAnne Smith, Gilded Balloon **** Don’t be fooled by DeAnne Smith’s gamine appearance of boyish clothing and Bieberesque hairstyle. And don’t be fooled either by the way her act begins with a riff on existential angst - prompted by an...

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

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...

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

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 –...

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Punt & Dennis, Touring

Hugh Dennis and Steve Punt: Funny, but less than the sum of their parts

Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis originally came to fame in the late 1980s as one half of the satirical sketch group The Mary Whitehouse Experience, with fellow Cambridge alumni David Baddiel and Rob Newman. Now, though, most people know them (as a double...

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Come Fly With Me, BBC One

There was always going to come a time when Little Britain had to stop. For a couple of years the heavily milked franchise seemed to be on a tape loop on BBC Three. Its international expansion - to the Greek islands one Christmas, to America for an...

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Year Out/Year In: Comedy Stands Up to Questions of Taste

Offensive? Moi? Jimmy Carr, keeping it real in 2010

It was a year when comics at opposite ends of the scale - offensive or annoyingly bland - were taking up room on our television screens and selling out ever-larger arena tours. And the depressing rule of thumb (with a few honourable exceptions) that...

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Frankie Boyle's Tramadol Nights/ The Morgana Show, Channel 4

Frankie Boyle’s Tramadol Nights is an interesting beast. A mix of stand-up, sketches and cartoons, it’s neither fish nor fowl, but many will certainly find it foul - with the comic’s penchant for sexually explicit material, unPC humour and...

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