Comedy
Veronica Lee
Judging by the average age of people in the audience, many of those who enjoyed Dick & Dom in da Bungalow when it aired on the BBC in the early Noughties were already adults. There was, though, a smattering of youngsters near their bedtime – good to see, as one of the most enjoyable elements of the weekend morning BBC children’s show, presented by Richard (Dick) McCourt and Dominic (Dom) Wood, was its anarchic attitude to rules.Whether a generation of schoolteachers would feel so fondly towards McCourt and Wood is another matter. They were plagued by their charges playing Bogies, a game Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Emmanuel Sonubi burst on the scene at last year's Edinburgh Fringe, where he was nominated in the prestigious Edinburgh Comedy Awards, and has since appeared on the BBC's Live at the Apollo and supported Jason Manford on tour. It's easy to see why he's broken through; the north Londoner is an instantly engaging presence on stage, with a cheeky conversational style that draws the audience in.He is now touring that nominated show, Emancipated. Its title appears to have little to do with the (at times scattergun) everyday material about parenting, being humiliated by a teaching assistant, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Chris Rock knows how to tease. It’s a safe bet that many watching this show are here for one thing – to hear his version of events that took place at last year’s Oscars, when actor and erstwhile rapper Will Smith came on stage and slapped the comic. First, though, he sets it up. Not by talking about the Oscars kerfuffle per se – although he tells us “Anyone who says words hurt has never been punched in the face” – but by cheeky asides that let us know Rock is leading us there. He references Snoop Dog and Jay-Z; he’s not dissing them, he’s at pains to make clear, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Crybabies – a sketch group comprised of Michael Clarke, James Gault and Ed Jones – were nominated for best newcomer for Danger Parade, a brilliant parody of Second World War adventure stories, at the 2019 Edinburgh Comedy Awards. Their second show, Bagbeard, was another critical success at last year's Fringe and is now having its second run at the Soho Theatre. It's a lot of fun.“This is a story of hope, love – and monsters,” says Jones at the top of the show. Like his compadres he plays several roles, necessitating super-quick costume changes behind the on-stage cloth. Bagbeard is a sci Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Bridget Christie is hot. Not in that way, you mucky pups. She’s hot because she’s 51 and menopausal, she tells us – and she’s on a mission to explain why, rather than marking a negative moment in her life, it’s the start of a new age, and a good one at that.She makes a persuasive case, setting out the downsides first. The hot flushes, obviously. The brain fog, the irregular periods – with the occasional “passata tsunami” – but mostly how it heralds invisibility for middle-aged women.But then, gradually, she builds her case to suggest that this is actually a great time in a woman’s life. If Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ricky Gervais tells us at the top of the show that there was a backlash to his 2022 Netflix special SuperNature. So big, he says, that it’s become the most watched comedy special of the year. “So I’ve learnt my lesson,” he says with a side-eye to the audience.This show, Armageddon, is going to push the boundaries a bit further, he continues, because he's road-testing material for the next Netflix special, to work out what's acceptable to include. It's a canny conceit; we're now complicit if we laugh at any “unacceptable” material, while Gervais can chide us for enjoying something he suggests Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The most striking thing at the London Palladium for the last night of “Weird Al” Yankovic's mini-tour of the UK was the number of youngsters in the audience. I don't mean young adults, but children, who were there with their parents and even grandparents. Surely they would be far too young to appreciate the American parodist's material? They wouldn't have been born when he came to fame in the 1980s with his parodies of pop hits such as “Eat It” (instead of Michael Jackson's “Beat It”), or “Like a Surgeon” for Madonna's “Like a Virgin”. Maybe their parents or grandparents had introduced Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Catherine Cohen made quite an impact at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe, where she won best newcomer in the Edinburgh Comedy Awards for The Twist? She's Gorgeous. Global events have delayed her follow-up and a UK debut tour, but here it is, and Come For Me was worth waiting for.The stage persona essayed in the Texan-transplanted to New Yorker's debut hour – a vain, self-obsessed diva – is now fully realised, as Cohen tells us about her life. There are enough biographical details in there (Catholic mother, Jewish father, comfortable upbringing) to ground the story in reality, but she builds an Read more ...
Veronica Lee
A lot has been happening in Lucy Porter’s life since she last toured. The pandemic we all know about, so she doesn’t detain us to recount her lockdown woes; they get merely tangential mentions in Wake Up Call as she talks about more recent events which included a health scare leading to something of a midlife crisis.But middle age isn’t all doom and gloom, she explains. Even when bad things happen they can lead to good outcomes (such as the vaue of good neighbours), and it’s the thrust of a show that will lift your spirits – a state of affairs helped greatly by Porter’s positivity and her Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
At one point in this brilliantly constructed and performed set, Alex Edelman ponders on the catchment area for his comedy and figures it might be the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Nah: this is comedy that can talk to anybody with a brain. Edelman is not from New York, though he studied English at NYU and lives a bicoastal life there and in LA. He grew up in Brookline, Boston, the son of a leading heart specialist; his brother AJ represented Israel at the Winter Olympics in South Korea. (There’s a hilarious section on that unlikely event — how could there not be?) They are a successful Read more ...
Veronica Lee
In 2022 we were finally able to welcome back the first “proper” Edinburgh Fringe since 2019. While I was disappointed that a few established comics – they know who they are – hadn't used the enforced layoff from live comedy to, you know, write new material, I was delighted to see others who had very obviously done so – and produced really memorable work.Chief among those were Leo Reich (with Literally Who Cares?!) and Colin Hoult (The Death of Anna Mann), who produced two ravishingly good five-star shows. If anything connected these two very different hours, it was rampant ego; Reich's Read more ...
Veronica Lee
US comic Alex Edelman first came to the attention of British audiences in 2014, when he was named best newcomer in the Edinburgh Comedy Awards for his show Millennial, in which, said one critic, “he regales us with tales of smart-arsery and backchat”. He has since toured with more of his clever and erudite observational comedy in Everything Handed to You and Just For Us, as well as performing them in the West End.Edelman is also a comedy writer and has contributed to The Great Indoors and Teenage Bounty Hunters, as well as Saturday Night Seder, a virtual celebrity Passover seder held during Read more ...