standup comedy
Helen Hawkins
As the man himself says, he was awarded an MBE last year, despite the dirt, for services to comedy – though which services weren’t specified… On paper that isn’t a remotely risqué remark, but Skinner can milk innuendo from anything that comes out of his mouth.His new West End set, road-tested in Edinburgh last year, raises an interesting question, though: has his act got less dirty over the years, or audiences more so? My memory of past Skinner sets is of a man revelling in stories that would have made the mainstream entertainment censors twitch before he arrived in the early 1990s, but Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Tatty Macleod, whose debut show is about the differences between the French and the English, has a confession to make: she's not French. She not even half English/half French, despite having lived her life between the two countries. But she's definitely bilingual and, as befits having a foot in both cultures, is well placed to compare her dual countrymen and women.It's a very good premise for Fugue, even if for most of the show Macleod – who first came to prominance on social media – doesn't detain us with anything much deeper than “the English are like this, the French are like that”.But she Read more ...
Veronica Lee
From Covid-delayed dates (yes, that's still a thing) to emotional comebacks and assured debuts, 2023 had much to offer.Of the big TV names rediscovering the joys of live comedy were Dick and Dom on their Covid-delayed 20th-anniversary tour and shiny-floor-show specialist Michael McIntyre, but the most anticipated return was by Peter Kay, who had cancelled his mega tour in 2017 for undisclosed family reasons. The first half of his show was entertaining enough but not memorable, but he pulled it out of the bag with a second-half coup de theatre. He's touring throughout 2024 and 2025, so Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The O2 has to be the K2 of comedy peaks: a vast ovoid drum of a place where those right at the back have to be content with watching magnified images on screens. And for a standup, there are no electric instruments to drown out the echoing acoustics.So it’s a measure of Trevor Noah’s charisma and charm that he cut right through these handicaps. It’s not the worst place he has played since his return to live comedy from hosting The Daily Show on US TV. That would be the giant tent his promoters booked for him in India, which had to have a score of air conditioning units on the go: there was no Read more ...
Veronica Lee
It takes some chutzpah to do a substantial section of a comedy show in 2023 (and touring until mid-2024) that deals with your pandemic woes, but that’s Michael McIntyre for you – he has never been short of confidence. To be fair, it’s the closing section of a solidly constructed performance of his everyman comedy, but runs the risk of being stale for those seeing him at the end of the tour.Macnificent is his first touring show in five years, during which his career as host of various shiny-floor shows – clips of which we see in a pre-show reel – has gone from strength to strength. His latest Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Recovery from alcoholism is now standard fare in stand-up comedy; so too are living with ADHD, OCD, depression and anxiety. It's the last of those conditions, combined with becoming sober, that 2017 Edinburgh Comedy Award winner John Robins has fashioned into a striking and affecting show, Howl, which I saw at the Gulbenkian Theatre in Canterbury.“Issues” don't always lend themselves to sparkling comedy, but Robins weaves an involving tale which begins, innocuously enough, with his venture to buy a slotted spoon. As he details precise dimensions of said utensil, descriptions of the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
In 2017, Bolton comic Peter Kay had to cancel his planned tour because of “family circumstances”. But then, when he announced last year that he was back in the saddle, the tickets for Better Late Than Never sold like the proverbial. Well into what has mushroomed into a mega tour continuing until 2025, I caught him at the O2 Arena.While it's good to have him back, much of the first half could have been written for any of Kay's previous tours since he was nominated for best show in the 1998 Perrier Awards (now the Edinburgh Comedy Awards) as he riffs on one of his mainstays, advertising jingles Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The show begins before the audience troops into the theatre; the walls of the staircase leading to it are plastered with images of Kate Berlant, its writer and performer; we file past her (sitting by the doorway with a sign saying “Ignore me”) and a long word-salad statement by her; and then, before she appears, we watch a film on the onstage screen in which – in arty black-and-white, quoting Stanislavsky and Oscar Wilde – Berlant preens and pouts and Looks Very Serious.It nicely sets up Kate Berlant Is KATE, her one-woman show (already a hit off-Broadway), in which the American stand-up and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Ahir Shah, Monkey BarrelAhir Shah is a fast talker, but then in Ends – which deservedly won best show in the Edinburgh Comedy Awards – he has a lot to say. It's a show about multiculturalism, family, identity, fitting in, and encompasses modern history on two continents, so he has a lot to pack in.He starts, more prosaically, by talking about how he got into this comedy lark because, as three generations of his family sat down together to watch Goodness Gracious Me in 1998, it was the first time he had heard his grandparents properly laugh out loud.Shah's family – specifically his late Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Janine Harouni, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★Names and identity feature heavily in Janine Harouni’s new show, Man’oushe, itself titled about where her family nickname comes from. Heavily pregnant (the reason why she is ending the show’s Edinburgh run tonight), Harouni tells us her baby’s origin story, and it’s by turns moving and hilarious, as she brings us up to speed with her life since we last saw her at the Fringe in 2019, when she was nominated for best newcomer.Harouni talks about her mixed feelings about becoming a mother, in part formed by her relationship with her parents. And, as an Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Olga Koch Monkey Barrel ★★★★Olga Koch's opening segment deals with bisexuality and her first threesome in some decidedly evocative language. That's what turning 30 does for you, she suggests – allowing her to engage in a more adventurous attitude to life and a more sex-positive one to relationships.Prawn Cocktail is her vivid account of her sort-of adult gap year during which she not only pushed her sexual boundaries but also gained a master's degree in parasocial relationships – or the “reply guys” who hilariously think they have a real connection with the famous women they engage with Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Darran Griffiths, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★Lots of comics talk about sex in their shows but few do so with such charm and purpose as Darran Griffiths with Inconceivable, his debut hour.The purpose is that it's about the struggle Griffiths and his wife went through to conceive their children. The charm is that Griffiths is very upfront about who of them bore the greater burden. “We didn't give birth. We didn't do shit,” he says at the top of the show. “We were in the same room, in different places.” It's not the first time he's satisfyingly self-deprecating.So we know the result of their Read more ...