standup comedy
Veronica Lee
Ari Shaffir ★★★★★There are some super-talented US comics at the Fringe this year, and Ari Shaffir is among them. The edgy, no-holds-barred New Yorker lays it out there with his show title, Jew, in which he charts why he has left his Orthodox upbringing behind. It started by asking questions of his rabbis – and two years at a yeshiva (a school that focuses on the study of the Talmud and the Torah) in Israel gave him the ammunition, but perhaps not in the way his teachers had intended.As you might expect of a dry-witted comic, the questions were not of the existential variety but rather ones Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Les Dennis was once a marquee name on Saturday night television as host of Family Fortunes, but since giving up the light entertainment lark he now plies his trade as an actor, and a very good one at that. If you've not seen it, give yourself a treat and watch his bang-on-the-nose performance as “Les Dennis”, a delusional, whinging has-been, in Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's Extras.Only slightly less meta is his role in Danny Robins' dark comedy, in which Dennis plays Bobby Chalk who was once, with his comedy partner Eddie Cheese, a household name with 20 million viewers. But now the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Bridget Christie tells us at the top of the show that she is a heterosexual, able-bodied, privileged white female – so why is she feeling so discontented? As she explains with great verbal dexterity in What Now?, it is living in a post-EU referendum world that has made her feel so discombobulated; left and right have no meaning any more, and – like so many British voters – she doesn’t know where her political home is.The Brexit vote has created some odd bedfellows, she says; it came as a big shock when lap-dancing club owner Peter Stringfellow said he was a fellow Remainer – because he didn’t Read more ...
Veronica Lee
For her past few shows, Sarah Kendall's stock in trade has been intricately crafted stories that mix fact and fiction, drawing on her childhood in Newcastle, New South Wales, and observations about the world she now lives in. Her latest show, One-Seventeen, continues in that vein, and this time she has threaded in some deeply personal material.The narrative moves back and forth between her childhood and her life today in south London as a married mother of two. Kendall tells us she's a mixture of her histrionic mother (whose cartoonish voice is superbly rendered here) and her scientist, facts Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The first thing that greets the audience in the foyer for Danny Baker's new show, Good Time Charlie's Back!, which I saw at Princes Hall in Aldershot, is the merchandise stall, selling various items; T-shirts for £20, programmes at £10 (pre-signed!), and mugs for £8. But despite this naked determination to relieve punters of their wads, no one can accuse Baker of not giving value for money, as the show last three hours, and counting. Boy, can this man talk.On stage there is a large acreen, straddled by two smaller screens with what turns out to be a list of the subjects in his seemingly Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ed Byrne is a worried parent. Thankfully his two young sons are hale and hearty, but he is concerned he may be bringing up a pair of pampered, Lord Fauntleroy youngsters, and in Spoiler Alert he ponders the differences between his experience of being parented as a child in the 1980s, and now being a dad himself.He wonders if his generation of parents may be giving a little too much to their offspring in material terms – “Social services send a drone to check you have a full-size trampoline in the back garden,” he says. And it’s not just ownership of a bunch of stuff that delineates the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
One of the joys of writing about comedy over the past few years is the decreasing frequency with which I am asked to comment on “women in comedy”, “female comics” or, most egregiously, “are women funny?” I think we can all agree that you're either funny or you're not, no matter which gonads you carry around. So it's interesting to see Funny Cow taking us back to a time – the 1970s – when female comics would be booed off stage.Maxine Peake is Funny Cow, a Northern working-class woman whose life is aimlessly drifting along until she sees the washed-up comic Lenny (Alun Armstrong) performing in Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's always nice to come away from a show having learned something and Angela Barnes, history buff and a woman with an obsession some may consider weird (more of which later), certainly fills in a lot of historical detail in Fortitude. Some of it touches on the Cold War and, as she drily points out, she never thought that section of the show, which started life at the Edinburgh Fringe last year, would be so up to date again.Barnes starts by talking about how she has recently entered her forties, but thankfully this is not a cue for pedestrian material about the perils of middle age. Rather, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
You may have seen Daliso Chaponda on Britain's Got Talent last year. He came third but, as he says, he was delighted as it brought him to a wider audience after working in comedy for 15 years – and made possible his first UK tour What the African Said. It draws on his peripatetic background (his father was a diplomat); he was born in Zambia, is Malawian by upbringing, spent some of his childhood in Zambia, Kenya and Somalia, and has been resident in the UK for 12 years after studying in Canada.Chaponda has great stage presence and some fine jokesHe's an instantly likeable performer, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Simon Evans, at 52, is far too young to be a grumpy old man, but he’s doing his best to prepare for the role, with this amusingly dyspeptic standup show at Soho Theatre about the ageing process, and how the evolutionary model appears to be moving backwards. According to his show Genius, things really aren’t getting better, at least in terms of human intellect and those who lead us.He starts by talking about the perils of ageing, about his thinning hair, senior moments and losing his spectacles. So far so predictable, but Evans has a breezy conversational style and a pleasingly original take Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The Glasgow International Comedy Festival kicked off with a performance by one of its most popular performers, Craig Hill, a comic far better known in his native Scotland than south of the border. That may be because his shtick relies so much on knowing the ins and outs of Scottish social classification – anyone from Fife, Paisley or Aberdeen was fair game for insults here, but non-Scots may be none the wiser.Hill, dressed in a petrol-blue kilt and kick-ass boots, started the show by gyrating to a dance track as he came on stage at Òran Mór. If wearing fetching kilts is Hill’s trademark, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Fern Brady is a young Scot with plenty of provocative opinions – on politics, society and relationships – with a delivery that can only be described as dry as a desert. It means that some pieces of information – as well as a few gags – take some time to pass through the “Is she joking?” filter. In Suffer, Fools she likes to confound audiences with two pieces of information she relates in fairly quick succession; she studied Arabic and Islamic history at Edinburgh University, and she put herself through college by performing at the city's “titty bars”.Brady neatly fillets those men who Read more ...