standup comedy
Veronica Lee
Colin Hoult: The Death of Anna Mann, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★★ Anna Mann – actress, singer, welder (you’ve got to have a back-up in this business, darling) – is the monstrous creation of Colin Hoult.She was last seen at the Fringe five years ago and now returns, but with sad news; she’s dying, her heart being “just too full”. As she nears the end, Anna gives us a potted biography – she describes her poor upbringing in Nottingham where her only toy was a stick, her many marriages and affairs with ridiculously named suitors, her daughter Mahogany and her, er, stellar acting career, Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Tiff Stevenson, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★ Tiff Stevenson doesn’t like labels, and is particularly irritated by how the once mildly mocking insult “Karen” is now just another misogynistic slur. So she invented a label for herself, Sexy Brain, which is the title of her show, and over the hour she explains how she arrived at itShe suffers from ADHD, or rather she diagnosed herself with it after failing to complete a bunch of online surveys (a symptom, apparently), and decided she has a sexy brain. Sexy as in mysterious – you know, the way women are supposed to be.Much of this is Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Sikisa is a new name on the comedy scene, but trust me you'll hearing and seeing a lot more of the south Londoner with Barbadian roots. Twerk in Progress, her in-progress version of her debut show Life of the Party, is a winning mixture of autobiography and social comment.She is an energetic performer and barely pauses for breath in the hour – even in the dance breaks she's exerting herself across the balloon-strewn stage – as she delivers her thoughts on house parties, feminism, dick picks and much more.Sikisa is, she tells us, the life and soul of parties, and the show is about the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Joe Lycett’s career was on an upward trajectory when he took on hosting duties on The Great British Sewing Bee, and the crafting show delivered a whole new audience for his live comedy. But anybody thinking that his sweet-natured wit was all there was to Lycett might be taken aback by some of his stand-up material.And so it proves in his new show, More, More, More! How Do You Lycett? How Do You Lycett? (a title he says was foisted on him by his agent), which was Covid-delayed and contains a section referencing a “giant donkey dick” – which some humourless person referred to the police, a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Irony can be a trump card for a provocative comic such as Ricky Gervais, and he plays it right at the top of his SuperNature, an updated version of a show he started touring in 2019, which was rudely interrupted by the pandemic and is now his latest Netflix special. “Irony, where I say things I don’t mean. There’s going to be a lot of that throughout the show,” he says, launching into a clever skit purportedly saying women aren’t funny, but which then moves on to, for some, the most pressing issue of the day, self-ID.“I love the new women, Gervais says. “They’re great, aren’t they? The Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Andy Zaltzman comes on stage to deliver a short preamble to his show Satirist For Hire. Much of the hour is suggested by the audience as they choose subjects they want him to muse on. Some have emailed before they arrive, others have left it till they arrive at the theatre; one shouts out a suggestion from the bar. Zaltzman leaves the stage for a few minutes to write some notes and then returns for the show proper.The performance is purportedly about the comic being on a mission to try to solve the world's problems with satire. But Zaltzman won't over-promise – after all, he says, the Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Brandon Wardell is a big social media star – he has a large following on Twitter and Instagram, YouTube and TikTok – and has in the past appeared as support for fellow Millennial Bo Burnham. And now he is doing a short run at the Soho Theatre.Wardell starts by asking who in the audience had heard of him before they bought tickets, and those who had not; on the night I saw the show it was split evenly between the two groups and he appeared disappointed. It's a fair enough question for an American comic doing his first UK run to ask but, along with him telling us to laugh more loudly, it Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Shaparak Khorsandi has reverted to her given name since she last toured (she used to be known as Shappi) but other than that not much has changed in her brand of feelgood comedy, and her new show, It Was the 90s!, is an amusing look back at her youth from the perspective of middle age.The show, which I saw at Soho Theatre, is Covid-delayed, but the pandemic barely features as Khorsandi delves rather further back to describe her twenties and the adventures she had, now viewed with the benefit of two decades of additional life experience. She has dived into her personal life before in her shows Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Sarah Millican is clearly glad to be back on stage, and the noisy reception she gets at the Winter Gardens in Margate suggests her fans are glad to have her back too. Bobby Dazzler is a crowd pleaser in much the same vein as her previous shows – unflinching honesty about women's bodies, and scatological filth.The first half of the show is mostly taken up with chatting to the audience about some of their dafter lockdown hobbies – knitting and yoga being two of the shout-outs. It's always a risk that people will be shy or that everyone did the same thing – knitting and yoga – but in Margate Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Nish Kumar comes on stage raring to go, and delivers 15 minutes of terrific political comedy that expertly skewers the Government and this country's leader “spraying jizz over us”. It's a barnstorming start to the show and worth the price of admission alone.Kumar can't quite maintain the energy or the rhythm of that first quarter of an hour, but most – although not all – of what follows is worth listening to. At the centre of Your Power, Your Control is a lengthy tale about the comic's appearance at a Lord's Taverners charity lunch in 2019 that went seriously pear-shaped. It's a story many Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Lots of stand-ups plunder their personal lives for material – whether it's about friends, parents, children or partners – and many a good show has been fashioned by the telling of tales about them, or comic exaggerations at least. But sometimes real life interrupts art in the rudest possible way.And so it proved with Alan Carr's new touring show, Regional Trinket, which starts with him telling us that he has a lot to update us on, not least his fabulous wedding in 2018 in Beverly Hills, officiated by his friend Adele. The day after I saw the show, Carr announced he was separating from his Read more ...
Veronica Lee
In 2019, Russell Howard was all set to celebrate his 20th year in comedy by going on a world tour. Covid put paid to that, so it was with some genuine celebration that he was able to return to the stage with Lubricant, his second Netflix special, recorded at the Eventim Apollo in late 2021.He was able to use some of the material of that anniversary show, Respite – about finding the pleasure rather than the pain in life and describing a world spinning out of control. Little did he know. In Lubricant he has skilfully updated Respite – written “when Corona was a beer and Harry was a prince” – Read more ...