For the first minute or so, I try to remember how to deliver coherent sentences – but people are laughingThis is the longest period I have gone without gigging since I started as a comic. It looks as if we’re moving towards indoor performances again, b…
Continue ReadingThe writer, director and Zach Galifianakis collaborator on the things that make him laugh the mostI’ve seen a LOT of standup. But I still think one of my favourite sets I’ve seen is one I wasn’t there for personally: John Mulaney’s Kid Gorgeous at Radi…
Continue ReadingAudiobook, available onlinePenguin’s fine pandemic audio festival delivers hours of laughs from comics including Jordan Brookes, Glamrou, Mo Amar, Michelle de Swarte and Sheeps‘I’m just imagining a world in which, I’m going to the fringe, the highlight…
Continue ReadingJohn Godber’s B&B drama – performed by the playwright, with his family – launches programme that includes one-woman Christmas showA play written by John Godber during lockdown is to be performed by the playwright, his wife and their daughter at the…
Continue ReadingPodcast There are secret recordings, spoof calls and cringing reflections in the performance artist’s attempts to find meaning in life‘I used to be a comedian,” says Kim Noble in part three of his new podcast. Comedy barely describes what he’s up to in…
Continue ReadingThe festival may be cancelled but our writer is determined to recreate the experience at home. So she pours a cider, steps into her bath – and logs on to the fringe’s freakiest showsThe Edinburgh fringe is always a highlight of my year. Where else but …
Continue ReadingThe festival may be cancelled but our writer is determined to recreate the experience at home. So she pours a cider, steps into her bath – and logs on to the fringe’s freakiest showsThe Edinburgh fringe is always a highlight of my year. Where else but …
Continue ReadingThe comedian and Motherland star on how she’s kept her comedy career afloat during the pandemicMo Gilligan: ‘A lot of us comics do feel like key workers’Mark Watson: ‘The pandemic makes you realise how precarious comedy can be’“I hated the first few mo…
Continue ReadingThe comedian has been finding inventive ways to bring his show to audiences during the crisisJessica Fostekew: ‘Online shows performing to just silence are the hardest’Mo Gilligan: ‘A lot of us comics do feel like key workers’The Bristol-born comedian …
Continue ReadingThe Observer’s critics recommend the best new arts in galleries, on air and onlineBeckett double billTrevor Nunn’s sell-out productions of Krapp’s Last Tape, starring James Hayes, and The Old Tune, with Niall Buggy and David Threlfall, opened in Januar…
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