standup comedy
Jasper Rees
Lee Evans (b 1964) has been doing his brand of unruly physical comedy on stage since his teens. In recent years, however, he has laid to rest the perception, held since he won the Perrier at Edinburgh in 1993, that he is an effing and blinding reincarnation of gormless Norman Wisdom. He has played Hamm in Endgame followed by Leo Bloom in The Producers and then one of the two gunmen in Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter. He surprised critics and audiences alike with the depth and subtlety of his acting and the mercurial brilliance of his gift for musical comedy. But his job, he insists, is stand-up, and Read more ...
ash.smyth
From Edinburgh to London and back, via Tatooine and Port Talbot, Rich Hardcastle has photographed playwrights and magicians, burlesque dancers and rugby captains, and regularly adorned the covers of The Big Issue, FHM and The Sunday Times Culture section. Along the way, though, the 40-year-old Londoner has missed no opportunity to shoot the great and the good-humoured, has documented Karl Pilkington’s idiocy abroad, and has produced the pictures for the illustrated book of Extras. Photographing funny faces, it turns out, is something of a specialism – and this month, his portrait of Rob Read more ...
ash.smyth
Being hailed as “the comedian’s comedian” is all well and good after you’re dead; but – as is often the way with great artists – it didn’t much help to pay the bills while Bill Hicks was walking and talking.Early on in Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas’s new 100-minute semi-animated biopic, Hicks’s sometime colleague and boyhood best friend, Dwight Slade, makes the claim that: “Society cherishes its funny people.” Perhaps that’s true now, if we’re talking about stadium comedy; perhaps that’s true if everyone can agree on a working definition of “funny”. But if this documentary showed anything, it Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It's typically intelligent and insightful stuff from the Irishman, who describes himself simply as a clown - but he's a clown with the requisite political knowledge and understanding of the human condition to make some pretty astute observations about how we are today. And despite his world view being basically lefty and libertarian at the same time, he's also self-aware enough to acknowledge his comfortable middle-class existence. When demonstrators were threatening to force their way into the Ritz Hotel in London in a recent protest, Maxwell's feelings were conflicted between thinking they Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Last year, Josie Long, famous for her whimsical comedy and fey delivery, decided to get serious. Disheartened by the election result, she started to do political comedy, but sadly her level of analysis was along the lines of: “Anyone who voted Tory in May's election is a fucking cunt.” One year on in The Future is Another Place, the level hasn't been raised.It speaks volumes that someone who broadly shares my politics can be so irritating, but suggesting that royalists dying is worth a whoop is just plain mean. Her suggestion that if, were the 95 per cent tax rate to be brought back, the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Chris Ramsey, Pleasance Courtyard ****It's easy to see why the Edinburgh Comedy Awards panel shortlisted South Shields comic Chris Ramsey. He's personable, very funny, has a well-constructed show - and is destined for a big television career any day soon. He used to allow the incorrect description of him as Geordie pass, he says, because he couldn't be bothered to explain the difference between Geordies, Makems and his own tribe, Sand Siders, until the television series Geordie Shore came along – and there was no way this working-class lad made good was going to be associated with that Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Sam Simmons, Gilded Balloon **** Sam Simmons clocks a young girl in the front row and stops the show. “How old are you?” the Aussie comic asks. “Ten,” comes the reply, and he suggests to her mother that this may not be the show for them, so they leave. And just in good time, as what follows is a load of cock and balls as Simmons is dressed in vest and pants which, after he is drenched during a gag, become increasingly, er, figure-hugging.Sam Simmons clocks a young girl in the front row and stops the show. “How old are you?” the Aussie comic asks. “Ten,” comes the reply, and he suggests Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Kieran and the Joes are a three-man sketch group (Kieran Hodgson, Joe Markham and Joe Parham, working with co-writer Tom Meltzer) who are young, personable and very neatly dressed in shirts and ties - but while they may appear clean-cut their comedy veers nicely towards the dark.In Teampowered the audience are the attendees at a teamworking seminar. You know where this is going to end up, as the trio will of course fall out and the team is destroyed by ego and stupidity, but how they get there has some neat touches, such as getting the audience to practise proposing to the Read more ...
theartsdesk
Tiffany Stevenson ★★★★The comic is currently appearing on Show Me the Funny on ITV, where her smily disposition is a welcome antidote to some of the sneery critics they have mustered. There’s boyfriend stuff in Cavewoman but Stevenson also delivers a few astute political observations, as well as the occasional unPC gag - such as suggesting Tina Turner's dance moves were inspired by her avoiding Ike’s punches.There are some nice riffs about going to a bingo session with her mother and the weird sisterhood she saw there, her penchant for leopardskin prints (you can take the girl out of...), the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
DeAnne Smith, Gilded Balloon **** Don’t be fooled by DeAnne Smith’s gamine appearance of boyish clothing and Bieberesque hairstyle. And don’t be fooled either by the way her act begins with a riff on existential angst - prompted by an Australian waiter saying “No worries” when he took her order - which turns into a song (one of a few in the set) accompanied by a ukulele. Don’t be fooled because you’ll realise there’s a lot of much edgier and darker material that she gets away with because she looks and sounds so sweet.Don’t be fooled by DeAnne Smith’s gamine appearance of boyish Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Jason Cook has masterly audience skills, and he needed them all the night I saw him. A middle-aged teacher (who really should know better), whose refreshment clearly led her to the delusion that she was the person people had paid to see, kept interrupting. Even the engaging and unfailingly polite Geordie comic's patience was wearing thin, but he constantly bested her and got on with the job of making us laugh.The Search for Happiness isn't as high-concept Cook's previous Fringe outings, but no less enjoyable for that because can make a room happy just by chatting - the gags Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Canadian is making a welcome return to the Fringe after a few years away and the break has served him well, as he's been doing a bit of travelling, and it was an incident when he flew to Indonesia that provides the starting point - and beautifully conceived climax - to No Lands Man. Wool clearly has one of those faces that border guards are attracted to. Not in that way, but they often figure he's concealing drugs, and on this occasion he was given a strip search. A horrible experience for most of us, but comedy gold to a comic, or at least a comic with a vivid imagination.So he Read more ...