Comedy
Veronica Lee
Brandon Wardell is a big social media star – he has a large following on Twitter and Instagram, YouTube and TikTok – and has in the past appeared as support for fellow Millennial Bo Burnham. And now he is doing a short run at the Soho Theatre.Wardell starts by asking who in the audience had heard of him before they bought tickets, and those who had not; on the night I saw the show it was split evenly between the two groups and he appeared disappointed. It's a fair enough question for an American comic doing his first UK run to ask but, along with him telling us to laugh more loudly, it Read more ...
Veronica Lee
After the latest disaster in Alan Partridge’s rollercoaster career, what would be the logical next move? To be a lifestyle guru, obviously. Partridge's creator Steve Coogan dipped into the idea back in 2008's Alan Partridge and Other Less Successful Characters and now, co-writing with Neil Gibbons and Rob Gibbons, Partridge is imagined as the purveyor of a lifestyle programme called Stratagem – where you turn STRAT into A GEM. No, me neither, but it’s as mad as anything else that the gaffe-prone broadcaster has come up with.The first half feels somewhat laboured, as if Coogan and his co- Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Shaparak Khorsandi has reverted to her given name since she last toured (she used to be known as Shappi) but other than that not much has changed in her brand of feelgood comedy, and her new show, It Was the 90s!, is an amusing look back at her youth from the perspective of middle age.The show, which I saw at Soho Theatre, is Covid-delayed, but the pandemic barely features as Khorsandi delves rather further back to describe her twenties and the adventures she had, now viewed with the benefit of two decades of additional life experience. She has dived into her personal life before in her shows Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Spoofs of children's entertainment is a rich area for comics – whether it's the permanently drunk Jeremy Lion (Justin Edwards), or the permanently disappointed Funz and Gamez (Phil Ellis) – as they create adult fun in a seemingly innocent world. And now Ed MacArthur and Kiell Smith-Bynoe take an interesting new tack with String v SPITTA.We are at Anastasia's sixth-birthday party in her luxurious home in Kensington in London, where all the oligarchs live. Mr String (MacArthur) and MC SPITTA (Smith-Bynoe) are appearing as a double for the first time, as they had become embroiled in a turf war. Read more ...
Veronica Lee
A lot has happened to British-Canadian comic Katherine Ryan since she last toured and was expecting to go back on the road in 2020 – the “pandem”, which affected us all, of course, plus unexpected marriage and second-time motherhood. Updating us on that, plus her thoughts on much more, is a lot to pack in but she does so at pace in a show that barely stops for breath.She keeps us waiting for a while before she tells us why this show is called Missus, though. First she has some nicely caustic asides about a few celebrities, her thoughts on anti-vaxxers and Covid conspiracy theorists, and the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Catherine Bohart had a more eventful lockdown than most, as it marked the end of a five-year relationship and what she describes as a sort of breakdown followed. To add insult to injury, the break-up came not along after she and her girlfriend, fellow comic Sarah Keyworth (whom she doesn't name in the hour), had launched You'll Do, a podcast about – you've guessed – love and relationships.This Isn't For You describes the pain of that time, but Bohart is such a positive presence, and lands the gags so well, that it's rarely downbeat. It is, however, occasionally reflective as she questions Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Sarah Millican is clearly glad to be back on stage, and the noisy reception she gets at the Winter Gardens in Margate suggests her fans are glad to have her back too. Bobby Dazzler is a crowd pleaser in much the same vein as her previous shows – unflinching honesty about women's bodies, and scatological filth.The first half of the show is mostly taken up with chatting to the audience about some of their dafter lockdown hobbies – knitting and yoga being two of the shout-outs. It's always a risk that people will be shy or that everyone did the same thing – knitting and yoga – but in Margate Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Nowadays, the jokes almost write themselves. As each new revelation of the Bacchanalia at 10 Downing Street appears (with much more to come, no doubt), political comics like Matt Forde must rub their hands with glee. It's almost as if he can just state the facts of what has come out that day, do a honk-honk sound and we'll know he's talking about our clown-car government. Thankfully, in his podcast The Political Party, he does more than that.This series' fortnightly podcasts are being recorded at the Duchess Theatre in London, and the audience get more bangs for their buck as they watch the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Nish Kumar comes on stage raring to go, and delivers 15 minutes of terrific political comedy that expertly skewers the Government and this country's leader “spraying jizz over us”. It's a barnstorming start to the show and worth the price of admission alone.Kumar can't quite maintain the energy or the rhythm of that first quarter of an hour, but most – although not all – of what follows is worth listening to. At the centre of Your Power, Your Control is a lengthy tale about the comic's appearance at a Lord's Taverners charity lunch in 2019 that went seriously pear-shaped. It's a story many Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Lots of stand-ups plunder their personal lives for material – whether it's about friends, parents, children or partners – and many a good show has been fashioned by the telling of tales about them, or comic exaggerations at least. But sometimes real life interrupts art in the rudest possible way.And so it proved with Alan Carr's new touring show, Regional Trinket, which starts with him telling us that he has a lot to update us on, not least his fabulous wedding in 2018 in Beverly Hills, officiated by his friend Adele. The day after I saw the show, Carr announced he was separating from his Read more ...
Veronica Lee
In 2019, Russell Howard was all set to celebrate his 20th year in comedy by going on a world tour. Covid put paid to that, so it was with some genuine celebration that he was able to return to the stage with Lubricant, his second Netflix special, recorded at the Eventim Apollo in late 2021.He was able to use some of the material of that anniversary show, Respite – about finding the pleasure rather than the pain in life and describing a world spinning out of control. Little did he know. In Lubricant he has skilfully updated Respite – written “when Corona was a beer and Harry was a prince” – Read more ...