tue 22/04/2025

sketch comedy

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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Stephen K Amos's new TV show

Stephen K Amos, dressed as his mother

Stephen K Amos, who was born in London to immigrant Nigerian parents, always used to joke that he would get a television series only when Lenny Henry died, because commissioning editors were working on a “one out, one in” basis where black comics...

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Edinburgh Fringe: Late Night Gimp Fight!/ While You Lie

'Late Night Gimp Fight!': fast-paced sketches on the sexually deviant side

Going to a late-night comedy show at the Fringe is always taking a risk, not least because every drunken fool in the place, with their oh-so-funny heckles, thinks they’re funnier than the performers. And so it proved at the performance I saw of this...

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That Mitchell and Webb Look, BBC Two

If you know David Mitchell and Robert Webb from Peep Show on Channel 4 (written by Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain), in which Mitchell plays the insufferably self-important Mark and Webb the self-deluding idiot Jeremy, then you will easily recognise...

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