Culture – Page 206 – ComedyNews.Org :: Comedy News Organization

Glenn Moore review

August 24, 2018TheGuardian

Just the Tonic @ The Tron, Edinburgh
Supposedly the story of his attempt to go on a mission to Mars, Moore’s set is actually a string of high-quality jokes

Comedy is not just about jokes, as we comedy types like to whinge – usually when Dave’s joke of the fringe top 10 is released to widespread nonplusment. But sometimes, jokes are precisely what it’s about – the time you spend at Glenn Moore’s show being a perfect example. Moore’s set – now nominated for the Edinburgh comedy award – is the best showcase of pure joke-writing skill I’ve seen on the fringe. They keep coming at you, and back at you, throughout the show, which purports to relate why Moore has applied to go on the first civilian mission to Mars. If he ever gets there, the little green men won’t know what’s hit them.

It’s richer than a straightforward battery of one-liners would be because Moore has threaded them into a story; and because (disavowing a career-long commitment to frivolous fictions) he pretends that the story is true. That’s just a game, of course, a wrong-way-up way of celebrating the ludicrousness of Moore’s shtick, as he introduces his flatmate, a surgeon who operates after all-night drinking sprees, and his inamorata, with whom he has sex so wild that “afterwards, we exchanged insurance details”.

Felicity Ward: Busting a Nut review – a jumble sale of jokes

August 23, 2018TheGuardian

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
From gags about vintage frocks to her toilet roll-hoarding mother-in-law, Ward is endearing, if under-powered

Not every Edinburgh comedy set needs a theme, story or tear-jerking finale. But it helps when the material coheres; when something turns a series of unrelated routines into a show. Aussie comedian Felicity Ward has assembled such sets in the past, addressing everything from her mental health to irritable bowel syndrome in smart, swaggering standup. But this year’s show, Busting a Nut, has no binding agent, save Ward’s livewire personality. It’s just a 60-minute club set ranging around such subjects as inspirational quotes, having a big nose and recent holidays.

That absence of narrative and argument puts pressure on the jokes. And for me, they don’t quite plug the gap. To begin, our host is newly married and living with her husband’s parents. Mother-in-law is a “feeder”, she says, and a hoarder of toilet rolls. The wedding is recalled, with a pedicure set piece (big-hitting if cut from familiar comic cloth) and a routine about Ward’s quest for a “vintage” frock. There’s a nice conceit casting the wind on Fuerteventura as a predatory man and a choice one-liner about yoga.

Lazy Susan: Forgive Me, Mother! review – brilliant send-up of #MeToo anxiety

August 22, 2018TheGuardian

Assembly George Square, Edinburgh
Sketch duo Celeste Dring and Freya Parker are unstoppable in an outrageous and irreverent hour for ‘ladies and predators’

‘Good afternoon, ladies and predators!” A host of comedy shows this year have addressed #MeToo, but none quite like sketch duo Lazy Susan’s. Rather than interrogate the climate of anxiety about male misbehaviour – or respond with disclosures of their own – in Forgive Me, Mother!, Celeste Dring and Freya Parker send the whole thing up. It is the most irreverent approach possible, and – as it collapses under Parker’s terror of the threat posed by male audience members – the show soars above anything the duo have previously done.

They’ve always been good, but they have tended to conceal themselves behind their characters. Not so here, where the sketches play second fiddle to the drama of Dring and Parker getting from one end of the show to the other. In a blizzard of an opening, the first questions to navigate are: does the show have an agenda? (nope) and what will we be saying about it afterwards? (Cue banal imagined post-show dialogues.) We’re presented with one gallery of “Sexy women … with a catch” and another of characters who won’t appear in the show, of which the gamine from the French movie written by a man (“Dance with me, Thomas! Dance with me in the rain!”) is a standout.

Edinburgh Comedy award shortlist includes Ahir Shah and Rose Matafeo

August 22, 2018TheGuardian

Felicity Ward, Alex Edelman, Glenn Moore, Larry Dean and Kieran Hodgson also among standups in the running for £10,000 main prize – but the list has some striking omissions

The shortlist has been announced for the 2018 Edinburgh Comedy award, and it’s the most traditional lineup the prize has seen for years. In what will be seen as a shortlist for standup purists, the Jewish American act Alex Edelman features with his show about gatecrashing a Nazi meeting, the terrific New Zealander Rose Matafeo gets her first (and overdue) nomination and, with the only show that’s not straight standup, Yorkshireman Kieran Hodgson is nominated for ’75, a storytelling show about the pre-history of Brexit.

Also included – and competing for a prize won last year by Hannah Gadsby’s Netflix phenomenon Nanette – are Ahir Shah (following up on his 2017 nod) with a set about visiting his deported Indian grandmother in the wake of the Windrush scandal, and the veteran Aussie comic Felicity Ward. Gags-man Glenn Moore makes a maiden appearance on the shortlist, and local hero Larry Dean, from Glasgow, is nominated for his breakup show Bampot after a Best Newcomer mention back in 2015.

Love Songs review – comedy in the key of life

August 21, 2018TheGuardian

Underbelly Cowgate, Edinburgh
Endearing storytelling carries the day in Alissa Anne Jeun Yi’s show, combining standup, poetry and rap

Alissa Anne Jeun Yi’s flyers call her Edinburgh fringe debut a “one-woman spoken-word and rap show” but Love Songs, tucked into the corner of Underbelly at Cowgate, comes across more like standup comedy. For most of the show, Jeun Yi bounces with endearing energy from anecdote to anecdote, all loosely connected to the theme of love.

With only occasional music and props kept to a minimum, it’s the storytelling that carries the piece. We hear how her parents met at university, the love lessons she learned watching soap operas in Hong Kong, and how her mixed-race Chinese and white heritage plays into the way her womanhood is viewed by the world. The sharp observations inspire genuine laughs. One, about fancying someone with a minimal triangle wrist tattoo – “it says so much whilst saying so little!” – is a reminder millennials can really nail our own self-ridicule.

I saw a man die on stage. It was me | Brian Logan

August 21, 2018TheGuardian

He’s been derided by Daniel Kitson, shamed by Stewart Lee – and now our comedy critic has been depicted having his brains blown out by Sam Campbell. Just as well he can take a joke

I can see why you might think it’d be alarming. I’m in the audience at Sam Campbell’s nutty late-night comedy show (I would say minding my own business, but that’s not quite true) when Campbell conjures photographs of three people on his upstage screen. “These are my enemies,” he says. My companion pokes me in the ribs – one of them is me. Next thing I know, Campbell (who won the prestigious Barry award in Melbourne with this show) is pointing a gun at the three headshots. I hear the crack of a pistol, and the image of my face collapses in a burst of cartoon blood. I’ve just watched a comedian blow my brains out live on stage.

In other circumstances, this might be – as they say these days – “triggering” for me. We’re permitted, I think, to be sensitive to images of ourselves being shot in the head. But I’m a live-comedy critic, I’ve got a thick skin when it comes to offence – and it’s not a new experience for me to cower in the audience while a comedian gets laughs at my expense. I remember an Edinburgh fringe many years ago when friends kept coming up to me saying: “Have you heard what Daniel Kitson is saying about you on stage?” I hadn’t, I didn’t really want to, but I soon did. Friends, it turns out, just can’t keep incitements to sexual violence towards comedy reviewers to themselves.

What was surprising, in both Kitson and Campbell’s case, was that I’d never given either of them a bad review

John-Luke Roberts review – Spice up your life with the nonsense manifesto

August 21, 2018TheGuardian

Assembly George Square, Edinburgh
A parade of daft characters and killer gags illustrate Roberts’ credo that absurdism reflects the chaos of being alive

Left-field standup John-Luke Roberts has always been appreciated as an innovator, coining new comedies on the margins while less interesting acts grabbed the plaudits. But the sense has persisted that he is more fun on paper than in practice; that for all his well-worked experiments, he lacks a certain warmth or those elusive “funny bones”. That’s less likely to be said of his buzzy new offering, with its orthographically challenged title: All I Wanna Do Is [FX: GUNSHOTS] With a [FX: GUN RELOADING] and a [FX: CASH REGISTER] and Perform Some Comedy!

The show is entirely its own thing: a run-through of 24 hitherto unknown Spice Girls, while delivering big, out-of-nowhere gags that could easily appeal to a wide audience. It is framed as a defence of nonsense. Our host – sporting shorts, a headband and a moustache died blue, in case we didn’t know where he was coming from – thinks stories are “a fantastic way of being lied to” and that absurdism better reflects the chaos of being alive. The Spice Girls, with their neat categories (Scary, Posh and so on), were just another failed system to make the world explicable. Better to let the madness in, as Roberts does by introducing us to Facts About the Romans Spice, Twenty-Seven Babies Spice and Lady Bracknell Crossed With a Theramin Spice – a funny premise, funnily realised.

John-Luke Roberts review – Spice up your life with the nonsense manifesto

August 21, 2018TheGuardian

Assembly George Square, Edinburgh
A parade of daft characters and killer gags illustrate Roberts’ credo that absurdism reflects the chaos of being alive

Left-field standup John-Luke Roberts has always been appreciated as an innovator, coining new comedies on the margins while less interesting acts grabbed the plaudits. But the sense has persisted that he is more fun on paper than in practice; that for all his well-worked experiments, he lacks a certain warmth or those elusive “funny bones”. That’s less likely to be said of his buzzy new offering, with its orthographically challenged title: All I Wanna Do Is [FX: GUNSHOTS] With a [FX: GUN RELOADING] and a [FX: CASH REGISTER] and Perform Some Comedy!

The show is entirely its own thing: a run-through of 24 hitherto unknown Spice Girls, while delivering big, out-of-nowhere gags that could easily appeal to a wide audience. It is framed as a defence of nonsense. Our host – sporting shorts, a headband and a moustache died blue, in case we didn’t know where he was coming from – thinks stories are “a fantastic way of being lied to” and that absurdism better reflects the chaos of being alive. The Spice Girls, with their neat categories (Scary, Posh and so on), were just another failed system to make the world explicable. Better to let the madness in, as Roberts does by introducing us to Facts About the Romans Spice, Twenty-Seven Babies Spice and Lady Bracknell Crossed With a Theramin Spice – a funny premise, funnily realised.

From Beyond the Fringe to Nanette: five shows that changed the face of comedy

August 21, 2018TheGuardian

With the Edinburgh fringe in full flow, here are the five standup sets that catapulted their creators to fame

These days, as BBC comedy controller Shane Allen recently confirmed, “Oxbridge white blokes” are out of comedy fashion. Time was they were the cutting edge, as when Messrs Cook, Miller, Moore and Bennett were cherrypicked to create Beyond the Fringe. A modest success at the Edinburgh festival in August 1960, it then made a huge splash in the West End. Here, as never before, the sacred cows of postwar Britain (the political class; the royal family; the military) were led to the satirical slaughter. Kenneth Tynan’s Observer review set the agenda: this was “the moment,” he wrote, “when English comedy took its first decisive step into the second half of the 20th century.” By design or otherwise, Beyond the Fringe punched a hole through English deference and launched the 60s satire boom. Without it, would we ever have had the Establishment Club and TW3, Monty Python and Private Eye?

Camilla Cleese review – drily amusing jokes about dad

August 21, 2018TheGuardian

Assembly, George Square, Edinburgh
In a set called Produced by John Cleese, the Python’s daughter shares the bill with political standup Steve Hofstetter

Having eschewed nepotism in the past to little profit, Camilla Cleese claims: “It’s now time I shamelessly exploited my last name to see if I can make it work.” And so her new show – or at least, the bill she shares with fellow US comic Steve Hofstetter – is called Produced by John Cleese. It’s isn’t, in the theatrical sense; but Camilla is, in the offspring sense. Shameless, indeed – but the fringe is nothing if not a hustle, and it’s working for Cleese Jr, who has audiences queuing around her George Square block on the strength of her surname alone.

I’m not convinced the 34-year-old has exhausted all the other possibilities of succeeding on her own merits. She might – like thousands of other comics – have brought a full hour to Edinburgh rather than just 20-30 minutes, first in 2014 and again this year. But at least, now as then, they’re drily amusing minutes, as our host deploys for our amusement her gold-digging Californian cynic persona – albeit flecked with a vulnerability that’s presumably real. (Hofstetter later tells us that, on this particular day, Cleese was performing through illness.)

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: