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Jayde Adams: The Divine Ms Jayde review – comedy in full diva mode

August 16, 2018TheGuardian

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
The standup’s compelling personality and powerful voice add up to emphatic entertainment in this musical show

The audience are on their feet by the end of The Divine Ms Jayde, which feels less like spontaneous reaction than part of the show’s choreography. That’s not to detract from the potency of Jayde Adams’ third fringe outing, a musical comedy created and performed with the Jerry Springer: The Opera maestro Richard Thomas. But it’s also one of those shows – and Adams has one of those personae – designed with bums-from-seats vertical takeoff in mind. In comedic terms, it’s so-so. But Thomas’s music, Adams’ powerful voice and her spotlight-compelling personality still add up to emphatic entertainment.

You could see it coming after 2017’s Jayded, which laid the ghosts of her low self-esteem to rest, but this year Adams goes full diva. She is wheeled on stage under a flowery bower. She splays herself louchely across a grand piano. She emotes like a trouper – albeit for laughs – in a number demonstrating how to tearjerk on stage. (It’s all in the wrists, surprisingly.) Elsewhere, several songs (Whatever Happened to Baby Jayde?; Things I Wish I’d Known When I Was Younger) send up musical-theatre soul-searching without discarding sentimentality.

Camilla Cleese on her dad John: ‘He’s not my favourite Python!’

August 15, 2018TheGuardian

The comedian is doing a show about her father in Edinburgh. She talks about the sexist LA standup scene, her reconciliation with her dad – and doing jokes about his ex-wives

With just a hint of a smile, Camilla Cleese admits that the name of her Edinburgh fringe show is “the ultimate, shameless nepotism”. It’s called Produced by John Cleese, even though it isn’t produced by him at all. But she is. “I don’t think he would put money into something as un-lucrative as this,” says the daughter of the comedy legend, “unless it was a marriage”.

Camilla barely mentioned the connection in her first Edinburgh show, back in 2014, except for some jokes at the expense of her father’s many – and often expensive – marriages. But this time around, more confident and more experienced, she’s embracing her heritage. “I want to talk a little bit about being his daughter but, because I’m not doing a full hour, I don’t really have the time to delve into all the different aspects. So it will be a combination of that and some of my standup. For people who are familiar with him and his work, it’s clear where my influences come from. I can blame anything offensive on him.”

If I misbehaved, he’d act like a gorilla, going on all fours. I’d be so embarrassed, I’d immediately shut up

If you’re asked to go on the road with a male headliner, there can be an assumption something is going to happen

Evelyn Mok: Bubble Butt review – a bummer of a show

August 14, 2018TheGuardian

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
Mok’s routines about sexuality, dolls and her mum’s disciplinary habits are promising but underpowered

By the end, Evelyn Mok is blaming tiredness and asking her audience’s forgiveness. It’s been that kind of show: misfiring, fatally underpowered. We are left to speculate how well her show Bubble Butt might work on a good day, but the signs aren’t encouraging. A #MeToo-tinged account of the comedian’s sexual sense of self, her tale of grooming never really goes anywhere, nor are her jokes quite good enough to compensate.

Mok puts herself on the back foot straight away, needlessly referencing her small audience. (Not that small, in fact.) The opening section ranges across her “overflowing” identity as a bisexual, plus-size “hashtag WOC”. We hear how her mother warned “you can’t find a hubby if you’re chubby” and how she attracts a very particular – and not very appealing – category of man.

Mr Swallow and the Vanishing Elephant review – a trunkful of tricks

August 14, 2018TheGuardian

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
Nick Mohammed doesn’t quite conjure the powers of previous extravaganzas but this entertaining set has some impressive feats of memory

Nick Mohammed’s comedy, magic and musical mashups have been among the highlights of recent Edinburgh fringes, culminating in a Houdini extravaganza two years ago that I’d happily have been chained to. His new show, The Vanishing Elephant, where he is again in character as excitable northern busybody Mr Swallow, doesn’t quite measure up. It’s more of a conventional magic show, without the preposterous narrative or musical overreach of its predecessors. I also missed erstwhile sidekicks Mr Goldsworth and Jonathan; Mr Swallow is a character at his eccentric funniest when he has someone to play off.

The conceit – it may even be true – is that Mr Swallow has narrowly failed to secure the elephant that would have supplied the show’s dramatic finale. Instead, he serves up some lesser illusions, a few impressive feats of memory – and character comedy too, if lower in the mix than usual. Sometimes the comedy and magic pull in different directions. In a subsidiary character as the scouse spirit-guide Claire, Mohammed pulls off a mean tarot card trick, but the alter ego is so garish – and the amplified voice so grating – the conjuring gets a bit overwhelmed.

‘After 15 minutes, my audience walked out’: standups on their Edinburgh debuts

August 14, 2018TheGuardian

Bridget Christie got locked out, Nina Conti ran off with a monkey – and Reginald D Hunter begged his ex for help. Top comedians relive their first fringe gig

Dave Gorman
I was 19 and nowhere near ready. I had a decent enough act – if there was a full house and everyone was up for it. But I had none of the skills needed for working a small, arms-folded, go-on-prove-it audience. Luckily, the only reviewer who came along didn’t hear my name and reviewed me under the title of the double act I’d replaced at the last minute. “Brute Farce,” wrote the critic, “is a strange young man who mumbles as he walks about the stage.” They’re probably still peeved.
Dave Gorman’s With Great Powerpoint Comes Great Responsibilitypoint tour starts in September.

Jessie Cave: Sunrise review – a twisted indie romcom in standup form

August 13, 2018TheGuardian

The Stand, Edinburgh
The comic’s tangled personal life is the subject of bracingly raw scrutiny in this dazzling display of soul-searching comedy

There’s intimate standup comedy, and then there’s Jessie Cave’s shows: animated diary entries tracing the ebb and worrisome flow of her sex life, her self-esteem – and her feelings for her randy ex-lover and the father of her kids, fellow comic Alfie Brown. Three years after the remarkable I Loved Her, which chronicled the couple’s Catastrophe-style hook-up, Cave is back to prove it was no one-off. Sunrise is just as potent, a grownup and emotionally intelligent hour of heart-on-sleeve comedy.

It’s a marvel that the show, so unflinchingly focused on her emotional life, does not feel self-indulgent. That’s because Cave presents it without a shred of self-pity: she’s matter-of-fact even when being devastatingly honest about her tortured feelings. It’s also a tribute to her writing skill. Sunrise pitches us right into Cave’s life, and her head. Much of it is narrated in the present tense; there’s minimal retrospective reflection. And so we trace her journey from loser in love, obsessively Googling her lover’s new partners, to tentative steps toward new romance, forever counting the hours she can spend away from her kids, scheduling sex with frantic efficiency.

Comedian Alex Edelman on meeting his antisemitic trolls: ‘Curiosity is my defining characteristic’

August 13, 2018TheGuardian

The 29-year-old Bostonian followed a string of racist tweets all the way to a white nationalist meeting – and turned the experience into his new Edinburgh show

The 29-year-old Bostonian comic Alex Edelman (“I’m from a really racist part of Boston called Boston”) resembles a caricature of a manic, wiseacre standup: eyes on stalks, voice pinballing between squeaky incredulity and basso profondo disdain, a pliable face combining Graduate-era Dustin Hoffman with Anne Hathaway at her most electrified.

But his new show, Just for Us, is anything but cartoonish. His previous work has touched on troubling experiences, such as performing for an antisemitic audience in Estonia, and he has no compunction about cracking near-the-knuckle gags: in one routine about attending summer camp, he referred to it as “the good kind of Jewish camp. The icebreakers at the other kind are way less fun.”

Edelman met Donald Trump years ago at an event in New York. ‘I thought: “This guy is the biggest piece of garbage”’

Edinburgh festival 2018: the 10 best jokes

August 13, 2018TheGuardian

From patriarchy and perineums to why Donald Trump is like a bikini wax … the funniest gags so far from this year’s standups

Athena Kugblenu: Patriarchy is putting Jane Austen on £10 notes the same time as bringing in contactless.

Christian Talbot: Sometimes even I don’t understand feminism. And I’m a guy.

Ahir Shah: Duffer review – political standup gets personal

August 13, 2018TheGuardian

Laughing Horse @ the Counting House, Edinburgh
The comic discusses race, mental health and mortality in a set that’s packed with difficult material

Ahir Shah made his name – and secured a 2017 Edinburgh comedy award nomination – with polemical standup about the disintegrating state of the world. This year’s set, Duffer, tries something different. It’s about his grandmother, who was deported from the UK – and from Shah’s family home – when he was five, and whom he met for the first time in 22 years on a recent trip to Gujarat. It’s a show with lots to recommend it, even if Shah’s style probably lends itself better to political than emotional comedy.

There is a political dimension to Duffer, mind you: Shah uses his gran’s enforced exile from Britain to make strident points about immigration policy. But mainly this is a personal set, about his ethnicity – there’s a gleeful opening routine about British Indians’ secret success (“Jews are taking a lot of our heat!”) – his struggles with depression, and the tug on this atheist millennial of his ancestral religion.

Sam Campbell: The Trough review – a brimming bowl of meaninglessness

August 13, 2018TheGuardian

Monkey Barrel, Edinburgh
Sense and subtlety are in short supply in this hour-long dive into the award-winning comic’s ‘wackadoo’ psyche

Inspired lunacy or meaningless drivel? In nonsense comedy, they’re separated by a thin line. With Sam Campbell’s show The Trough, we’re in the realm of Harry Hill or Sam Simmons, where non sequitur follows prop gag follows wildly arbitrary behaviour, all in aggressive defiance of good sense. For me, this falls short of the best absurdism: there’s no subtext, nor implication that his “complete case of the wackadoos” is a displacement activity for anything else. Neither does Campbell – like Hans Teeuwen, say – bring quite the level of skill and commitment that makes complete meaninglessness fly.

All that said, The Trough – which after Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette in 2017 won the Barry award at the Melbourne comedy festival – is a reliably amusing way to spend midnight hour on the fringe. From its opening video, using Kevin Spacey’s face to express Campbell’s dismay at observational comedy, it cocks a manic snook at convention. Our host’s neurotic energy, frequent bolts off stage to collect daft costumes and props, and unexpected interruptions from the crowd generate considerable instability as Campbell compares throat lozenges to gemstones and compels us to bow down before pictures of monkeys. So too does the animated sequence when he blows the brains out of his enemies (one of them, alas, is me).

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