Truly, the older Julian Clary gets the filthier he becomes. As he warns us in almost the first line of The Joy of Mincing, which celebrates 30 years in the business, “Are you ready for filth?”
He isn’t mis-selling, and the audience at the Congress Theatre in Eastbourne, where I saw the show, loved every naughty minute of it. The combination of the British seaside and ultra-camp comedy from this “renowned homosexual” was a winning one.
It's striking what a broken heart can do for a comic. Not least it can provide him with some new material, but also make him take a step back to reevaluate what he has. In Marcus Brigstocke's case it led him into a horrible depression but happily, via some other byways, to this new show, Why the Long Face?, which started life at the Edinburgh Fringe last year.
“It's a really bad word,” Jena Friedman says as she opens her show, American C*nt. “...American.” And so begins an evening of ultra-dry, drawled-out and darkly feminist wit that encompasses everything from recent atrocities in Belgium and Donald Trump to abortion and Hamas.
Isy Suttie, an ever-smiling and engaging stand-up, may come across as a real-life version of Dobby, the perpetually nice character she played in Peep Show, but that's somewhat to deceive. While she is an immensely warm comic she used to have, she told us at Winchester Discovery Centre, some very strict rules about choosing a boyfriend; he must be grammatically aware of the difference between your and you're (I have no problem with that, obviously) and, most strikingly, he mustn't like the sea – “It's just water that moves a bit”.
Before Canadian comedian and British TV panel show regular Stewart Francis arrives on stage his audience are entertained with his one-panel cartoons. These, Sharpie-penned in black, are projected as a slideshow (sample: in a fishbowl, one fish says to the other, “It’s all kicked off again in the Middle East” – title “Topical Fish”). It’s unfortunate that whoever set this up couldn’t be bothered to centre the image, since a good quota of the jokes' key lines were rendered non-existent, chopped off at the top.
Even if the evening had turned out to be rubbish, there was always going to be a warm welcome for Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer's return to live performance with 25 Years of Reeves & Mortimer: The Poignant Moments. Aside from the obvious room for nostalgia, Mortimer almost didn't make it; this tour could start only after he had emergency triple bypass surgery last year. Thankfully, it hasn't affected either his or Reeves' gift for utter silliness, as their appearance at Dave's Leicester Comedy Festival proved.
Dave Gorman was probably the first comic to have embraced technology in his stand-up. Albeit, in the early days, it was using 35mm slides, hand-drawn graphs and an overhead projector, but then latterly a computer and the ever-more influential Internet and social media. And so, as is a feature at all his shows, there's a large screen on stage when I see him at the Royal Festival Hall and when he says: “I've put it on a graph” there's a loud cheer of recognition from the audience.
Eddie Izzard tells us at the top of a show lasting two-and-a-half hours that he's on the home straight in a mammoth tour taking in 28 countries. He first performed Force Majeure in 2013 and now, in a slightly rebooted form, he parks it in the West End for an extended run as Force Majeure Reloaded.
When Anne Edmonds comes on stage I notice a banjo sitting ominously in a corner. She is full of Australian bonhomie and energy, instantly connecting with the audience, and our first impression is that she's a likeable chatterbox, telling anecdotes without punchlines - and she begins with a lengthy one about spewing copiously on a New Year's Day flight in front of her parents some years ago.
What a trouper Bill Bailey is. Just as he's introducing what is clearly meant to be a showstopper in which he and the audience would create a number in the style of “maestro of melancholia” Moby, his technology lets him down. But no fear, Bailey ad libs for several minutes as he tries to rectify the problem, knocks out an Irish reel on one of the many instruments on stage, and moves on when it's clear that the “Moby song" will have to remain unsung.