Simon Evans, at 52, is far too young to be a grumpy old man, but he’s doing his best to prepare for the role, with this amusingly dyspeptic standup show at Soho Theatre about the ageing process, and how the evolutionary model appears to be moving backwards. According to his show Genius, things really aren’t getting better, at least in terms of human intellect and those who lead us.He starts by talking about the perils of ageing, about his thinning hair, senior moments and losing his spectacles. So far so predictable, but Evans has a breezy conversational style and a pleasingly original take Read more ...

The Glasgow International Comedy Festival kicked off with a performance by one of its most popular performers, Craig Hill, a comic far better known in his native Scotland than south of the border. That may be because his shtick relies so much on knowing the ins and outs of Scottish social classification – anyone from Fife, Paisley or Aberdeen was fair game for insults here, but non-Scots may be none the wiser.Hill, dressed in a petrol-blue kilt and kick-ass boots, started the show by gyrating to a dance track as he came on stage at Òran Mór. If wearing fetching kilts is Hill’s trademark, Read more ...

Fern Brady is a young Scot with plenty of provocative opinions – on politics, society and relationships – with a delivery that can only be described as dry as a desert. It means that some pieces of information – as well as a few gags – take some time to pass through the “Is she joking?” filter. In Suffer, Fools she likes to confound audiences with two pieces of information she relates in fairly quick succession; she studied Arabic and Islamic history at Edinburgh University, and she put herself through college by performing at the city's “titty bars”.Brady neatly fillets those men who Read more ...

New Zealand comic Rose Matafeo is a fan of romcoms and has decided she is destined to appear in one at some point in her career. As she explains, it's not possible – as a mixed-race woman – to play the film's heroine, but she is surely a shoo-in for the role described in show's title, Sassy Best Friend; after all, she has the wild hair, the specs and the perky personality that such a character demands.This is a breezy but wry set-up for an hour of comedy that subtly examines race, feminism and mental health as Matafeo explores her teenage anxieties and how she has (mostly) overcome them as an Read more ...

Hannah Gadsby was awarded best show (jointly with John Robins) at the 2017 Edinburgh Comedy Awards for Nanette, which had already been given the equally prestigious Barry award at last year's Melbourne Comedy Festival. Gadsby draws us in gently, telling us that Nanette was so titled before she really knew what the show was going to be about, and she named it after meeting an unfriendly and unhelpful barista in smalltown Australia, in one of those places that she – a lesbian who is sometimes taken for a man – feels really unwelcome in.That's probably the lightest moment in Nanette's 80 minutes Read more ...

“I don't want to talk about Donald Trump,” Andrew Maxwell tells us as he comes on stage at the beginning of Showtime, because no matter what comics make up about the US President, he then goes and does something more weirdly comic, more comically weird, than they could ever invent.Instead the Irish standup, who has lived in the UK for the greater half of his life, muses on Brexit and beyond, seeing the world through a resident's eyes – but with the sharp observation of someone who will always remain an outsider.Daftness always quickly follows the seriousTalking of which, this keen European Read more ...

Chris Rock, another fine alumnus of the comedy factory known as Saturday Night Live, rarely comes to these shores, so his short arena tour was welcome. He last visited the UK 10 years ago as he had been busy with, among other things, presenting the Oscars, voicing Marty the Zebra in the Madagascar films and bringing up a family.The last subject was part of a lot of personal material in his 90-minute set, much of it about the break-up of his marriage, of which more later. First, though, he addressed the post-Harvey Weinstein world we now live in, assuring us that he no longer touches any Read more ...

In the early 1990s, a group of students at Leicester Polytechnic (now De Montfort University) staged an end-of-year comedy project. Three of them – Claire Walker, Abi Palmer and Geoff Rowe – developed the idea into what in 1994 became the first Leicester Comedy Festival; Walker and Palmer have gone on to other great things in the arts and Rowe remained as the festival's director. Under his leadership it has gone from strength to strength – second only to the Edinburgh Fringe in its stature in the industry. So drum-roll for the 25th incarnation of the Leicester Comedy Festival, with Ed Byrne Read more ...

The Edinburgh Fringe is usually the high point of the year for comedy, but in truth it wasn't a solid five-star year – although there were some stand-out performers. And if the test of good comedy is the shows that stay with you, and which you want to see again, then a few are definitely up there.Chief among that group was Hannah Gadsby's Nanette, an astonishing piece of work that she says is her valedictory show. That's because making comedy for other people from her life and experiences as a gay woman growing up in a deeply conservative and homophobic Tasmania – many of them painful or Read more ...

Margaret Cho takes no prisoners: if you don’t like good honest filth or feel uncomfortable around matters of feminism, sex and race, then this Korean-American comic is not for you. Cho was voted among the top 50 comics of all time by Rolling Stone magazine and was a protégée of Joan Rivers, a scabrously funny stand-up herself who skirted dangerously around taste and decency.Like Rivers, Cho appears to have no embarrassment in talking about her toilet habits or her sex life, and says her move from being lesbian to bisexual was because she realised she had “a place for cock in my life – inside Read more ...

John Bishop was last on tour three years ago and he tells us that this show, Winging It, was inspired by two things that happened in the intervening period. Not the obvious Brexit (although it does make an appearance), but in that time he has passed the 50 landmark and his three sons have all left home.Bishop's calling card is laidback observational comedy, and as befits someone who started late at this comedy lark – he's celebrating 10 years as a full-time stand-up, having made the jump from being a rep for a pharmaceuticals company – he never forgets where he came from, a Liverpool council Read more ...

Kerry Godliman is such an affable and down-to-earth onstage presence that when she talks about whether she should move now that her area has upped and come – you can tell by the local baker making sourdough loaves – you think how much her neighbours would miss her.Moving – whether geographically or along the social scale – is the central theme of Stick or Twist (which I saw at Soho Theatre), but Godliman neatly swerves into lots of other territory including bad parenting, female friendship and the invasion of hipsters in her previously gritty London abode. If she and her husband sold up, she Read more ...