Comedy Reviews

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

Veronica Lee Thursday, 11 August 2011

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 – but it does play a part in her act.

Edinburgh Fringe: Lounge Room Confabulators/ Andi Osho/ Matthew Crosby

Veronica Lee Wednesday, 10 August 2011

Stuart Bowden and Will Greenway tell tall stories in your living room

Imagine that Tim Burton, or some other great modern-day storyteller of your choice, knocks at your door and asks if he can come into your living room for an hour to tell some fantastical stories. You would get some beers in and friends around pronto, right? Well, the Lounge Room Confabulators, a duo from Australia who tell stories in the Burton...

Edinburgh Fringe: Margaret Cho/ The Wheel/ Jessica Forteskew

Veronica Lee Tuesday, 09 August 2011

Margaret Cho, Assembly ****

Margaret Cho is back, and how. Ten years away from the Fringe, the American-Korean bisexual - “I'm just greedy, I guess” - is a little softer around the edges maybe, but still as funny. With her lefty humour, punctuated by lots of adult content, she is waspish, but definitely not Waspish.

Edinburgh Fringe: The Monster in the Hall/ Joel Dommett/ Katherine Ryan

Veronica Lee Monday, 08 August 2011

'The Monster in the Hall': 'The play is performed by four actors, who also form a sort of Greek chorus made flesh as a 1960s girls group, The Fabulous Duckettes'

The Monster in the Hall, Traverse ****

David Greig's indie comedy musical, first performed at Glasgow's Citizens Theatre at the end of last year, is a bright and inventive four-hander about a 16-year-old girl struggling to keep everything together. Duck Macatarsney (Gemma McElhinny), who writes escapist stories in her room, cares for her biker dad, known as Duke, who suffers from multiple sclerosis. At the beginning of the play Duke (Keith Macpherson) is struck blind.

Sam Simmons, Soho Theatre

Kate Bassett Sunday, 24 July 2011

Sam Simmons: the award-winning Australian gives a deliberately shamateur performance

The award-winning Australian comedian Sam Simmons is shuffling around in a pair of bread loaves. He's wearing them like slippers and trying to take bites out of them at the same time. Indeed, his tremendously silly show, Fail, is essentially a shambles. This is the overarching joke: it's his absurd non-sequiturs and his tongue-in-cheek, shamateur performance style that reduce his audience to spasms of laughter.

theartsdesk at the Latitude Festival: Smorgasbord in Suffolk

David Cheal Tuesday, 19 July 2011

Latitude: Well run, pleasant, helpful, and with the customary array of attractively coloured sheep

Latitude: this four-day event in the attractive environs of Henham Park, near Southwold, is, as its slogan says, “more than just a music festival”. Quite so. But how to review such a groaning cultural smorgasbord? This year, rather than delivering an indigestible wodge of words, I thought I’d take a slightly different approach; thus my account of my four days in Suffolk is divided into thematic sections which correspond only roughly to the festival’s own creative categorisations. So...

Jeff Garlin, Soho Theatre

Veronica Lee Friday, 24 June 2011

It must be the beautiful British weather that has attracted a bunch of American comics to UK shores recently. Just before Las Vegas legend Rita Rudner starts a short season at the Leicester Square Theatre in London and hot on the heels of his Curb Your Enthusiasm sometime colleague Jerry Seinfeld (who recently did one night at the O2 in Greenwich and of whom more later)...

Comment

The Pajama Men, Soho Theatre

Jasper Rees Tuesday, 21 June 2011

Wakey, wakey: Shenoah Allen and Mark Chavez are The Pajama Men

The 2009 Edinburgh Fringe featured a likeable comic duo in pajamas with imaginations as elastic as their faces. The titular garment – spelt the American way after their nationality – suggested both excitable role-play after lights out and those internally logical narratives we visit in our sleep. Their enacted tales of ghouls and freaks, nutters and natterers made only a perfunctionary effort to cohere, but audiences collapsed with laughter and the Pajama Men have now twice taken up...

The Flying Karamazov Brothers, Vaudeville Theatre

Ismene Brown Monday, 20 June 2011

The Flying Karamazov Brothers: The same routines for 30 years have done them no harm whatever

The Flying Karamazov Brothers give a new meaning to the word “practised”. Their first stage show in 1981 was called Juggling and Cheap Theatrics - a smart title that they could have kept for the show they bring to London’s West End, largely made of routines that this celebrated US comedy-juggling act have been doing for decades. It’s weird to see in YouTubes of their early performances some of the material I watched last night at the Vaudeville. Still, the fact is those old...

Derren Brown: Svengali, Shaftesbury Theatre

Veronica Lee Monday, 13 June 2011

Derren Brown: Witty and urbane performer who never humiliates his on-stage subjects

Derren Brown is witty, urbane, clever and a keen student of what makes humans tick - which must come as a huge advantage when you are developing an evening’s entertainment based on kidology. He makes it clear he’s not a psychic or clairvoyant and that there is a rational explanation for everything he does in his two and a half hours on stage, and indeed describes himself as “Illusionist, mentalist and sceptic” - I imagine emphasis is on the sceptic.