standup comedy
Veronica Lee
Phil Wang Pleasance Courtyard ★★★Phil Wang used to perform as part of sketch group Daphne, and his new solo show's title, Philly Philly Wang Wang, hints at their sometime schoolboy humour. He starts the standup on the Edinburgh Fringe by dropping various puns on his name, and each manages to top the previous one. It's a strong start.But Wang is 29 and wants to talk about more serious things (although there's an extended fart gag in the set), such as how modern men think and act. He has some good material about why, still, women are the ones in straight relationships who have to Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Clive Anderson Assembly George Square ****Clive Anderson has obeyed the Fringe comedy gods and given his debut solo show a title and a theme. Actually, Me, Macbeth & I is mostly just him talking very amusingly for an hour about his days in the Cambridge Footlights, his dual careers in law and on television - and that interview with the Bee Gees.He’s a fantastic raconteur, even if he does have a verbal tic of “Oh I must just mention this”, or “Before I tell you that”. Anderson is so full of stories that if he did lose his place in the script it really wouldn’t matter.Anderson demonstrates Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Nick Helm Pleasance Dome ****What a pleasure it is that Nick Helm has returned to the Fringe after six years away after appearing in television comedies Uncle and The Reluctant Landlord.That’s the straightforward reason he has been a stranger to Edinburgh, but doesn’t explain his 18 months away from standup, or why the show is called Phoenix From the Flames. He tells us it’s because he was finally getting to grips with the depression he has suffered from all his life (he’s now 38).That sounds like a bummer way to start a comedy show, but this is Nick Helm, so of course it starts Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Josie Long The Stand ★★★★ It has been five years since Josie Long performed a full run at the Fringe, and in the meantime she has experienced a momentous event. She has had a daughter – whom she welcomed into the world, she tells us, with an impassioned speech about how it’s all gone to hell in a handcart, with a Tory Prime Minister and the climate-change emergency threatening to end the world before the wee one reaches adulthood.Of course she didn’t, but such are Long’s woke left-wing credentials that you could believe that she would.Her new show, Tender, is largely about pregnancy and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
How to describe a show that by Robin Ince’s own admission doesn’t have a narrative strand, and for which he has written several pages of notes that he gets through only a small section of? Well here goes: he calls the show a mash-up of the two cultures of art and science in a celebration of the human mind, and Chaos of Delight is very well named.Ince races through an almost embarrassing richness of material, going down highways and byways as he talks about whatever comes into his head or is prompted by a selection of photographs that he clicks on to the onstage screen.As anyone Read more ...
Veronica Lee
A Jerry Seinfeld appearance in the UK is an event. For one thing it's rare (he was last here in 2011) and for another he's a comic hero to many for his eponymous sitcom, which he co-created with Larry David.Seinfeld's opening set piece is about wasting time. No bragging, but he has a lot of time to waste these days, and we might as well waste our time spending an evening with him, wasting time together. It's typical Seinfeld – lengthy, seemingly freewheeling storytelling but which is precision-honed as goes down various highways and byways to get back to his original point.His shtick is Read more ...
Veronica Lee
There has been a trend in stand-up comedy in recent years for intensely personal shows, confessional even, but it’s the comic’s life that is usually the one being examined for comedic effect. With Arthur Smith’s latest show at Soho Theatre, however, it is his dad’s life being described here, and what a life.Syd is a funny and touching account of a life well lived. Smith bases the show on the memoir he asked his father to write, which described, among other things, his wartime experiences at El Alamein and as a prisoner of war in Colditz. He later became a policeman whose south London beat was Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Frank Skinner walks onstage without introduction and a man in the audience gives him a friendly heckle by way of greeting. Skinner is straight on it, engaging him in a brief conversation; his responses are amiable enough but have a few barbs too.That's a Skinner hallmark: his smiley demeanour suggests a bloke you might have a nice chat with, but he doesn't suffer fools. And if the comic does less stand-up than broadcasting these days (his last new show was four years ago), he hasn't lost the art of the sly putdown.This hour-long set is a sort of preamble to his longer touring show, Showbiz, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Most people know Emily Atack from The Inbetweeners, where she played Charlotte, the object of Will's desire. More recently, she found new fans as the runner-up on 2018's I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! Now she is performing in her first solo comedy show, Talk Thirty to Me.It's not so much stand-up as a conversational run-through of how she came to be here, 29 and worried about hitting 30, and of her career to date. We see a montage of pictures on the large on-stage screen, ending with a video clip of Atack parachuting into the jungle and screaming every inch of the way. The show Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Reginald D Hunter drops the n-bomb near the top of the show. He means no offence, he tells the audience, but it's the vernacular where he comes from in Georgia. And besides, using that word, as well as expressing some trenchant opinions about the differences between men and women, and the politics of race, has sort of become Hunter's calling card. Provocative, controversialist, whatever – as an African American living in the UK for the past 21 years, he has opinions worth listening to even if you don't share them.The genesis for his new show, Facing the Beast, was that anniversary, as well Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Komedia is a Brighton Institution and celebrates its birthday tonight in a suitably raucous fashion. The Komedia began in 1994, founded by the directors of the Umbrella Theatre Company, and styled on the cabaret spaces they’d experienced touring Europe. It moved to its current premises in 1999, turning a ramshackle labyrinthine building that housed a hippy-style market (before that a Tesco) into a labyrinthine building housing a bar-venue-cinema complex, with the central hub in the large basement.So much for architectural history! There’s also another anniversary this year, that of the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Tommy Tiernan is something of an institution in his native Ireland, as a stand-up comic, newspaper columnist, sometime chat show host and full-time controversialist. Now his appearance as Da Gerry in Channel 4's Derry Girls has brought him to a wider audience – both geographically and generationally – and deservedly so.Tiernan arrives on stage with little fanfare, and proceeds to do what he does best, sharing stories with the audience as if we're just having a chat over a pint. From small beginnings he builds fantastical tales, but ones that often have an underlying serious point to make, Read more ...