The South African standup and late-night satirical news anchor on what makes him laugh the mostIt has to be Ross Noble. I saw him at the Cape Town comedy festival in 2002. I was in high school. His improvising was so good it made me never want to try. …
Continue ReadingSoho theatre, London
In her show One-Seventeen, the Australian comedian grapples with big ideas but these absorbing stories don’t fully connect
In a recent trilogy of shows, Sarah Kendall told long-form tales of her teenage years in Newcastle, Australia – tales that pirouetted on the line that separates truth from fiction (and indeed storytelling from standup). Her latest, One-Seventeen, deals as much with grownup as with adolescent Sarah, and tells not one long story but several interconnected short ones. Their connectedness is the point, at least according to Kendall’s closing tale, which invokes wonder at how lives (and stories) interrelate and overlap. But I’m not sure the show quite bears that philosophic weight: it’s absorbing from one moment to the next, but adds up to no more than the sum of its parts.
It’s introduced as “a show about luck”, and begins in 10-year-old Kendall’s garden, where her family gathers at night to watch Halley’s comet race across the sky. Stargazing is a recurring theme in a show that opposes two viewpoints on chance and mischance. To Kendall’s mum, almost everything can be construed as a bad sign. But her dad is phlegmatic: bad luck is often good luck in disguise.
Related: Sarah Kendall: the worst heckle I ever received – and what I did with it
Continue ReadingRhona Cameron, Rachel Fairburn and Shappi Khorsandi give their verdict on the film in which Peake plays an aspiring comic in a man’s world
Related: Funny Cow review – Maxine Peake blazes in the dark days of standup
Continue ReadingThe actor and comedian explains how her debut play, 3Women, captures the age divide within feminism – and the defiance of the #MeToo era
I recently gave a talk at a girls’ high school. I mention this not only because I am a virtue-signalling monster but also because one of the young women asked something that brought me up short: “How should we react, as young feminists, to older women who don’t seem to support us?”
I sat there and goldfished for a moment, keenly aware that these freshly minted teenage minds sat among their esteemed “older women” teachers. But this is one of the issues I have been grappling with in my debut play, 3Women, which is about three generations of the same family, aged 18, 40, and 65. They come together in an increasingly claustrophobic hotel suite the night before a wedding, ostensibly to enjoy some family bonding time. As more wine is ordered and drunk, the gloves come off, and there are old scores to settle.
Continue ReadingThe actor and comedian explains how her debut play, 3Women, captures the age divide within feminism – and the defiance of the #MeToo era
I recently gave a talk at a girls’ high school. I mention this not only because I am a virtue-signalling monster but also because one of the young women asked something that brought me up short: “How should we react, as young feminists, to older women who don’t seem to support us?”
I sat there and goldfished for a moment, keenly aware that these freshly minted teenage minds sat among their esteemed “older women” teachers. But this is one of the issues I have been grappling with in my debut play, 3Women, which is about three generations of the same family, aged 18, 40, and 65. They come together in an increasingly claustrophobic hotel suite the night before a wedding, ostensibly to enjoy some family bonding time. As more wine is ordered and drunk, the gloves come off, and there are old scores to settle.
Continue ReadingThe actor, writer and standup on the things that make him laugh the mostGreg Davies. His face, his stories, his sweet bod. Continue reading…
Continue ReadingFrom José the Mexican immigrant to Achmed the dead terrorist, his foul-mouthed puppets have made him one of the richest comedians on the planet. How will the ventriloquist go down in Britain?
Jeff Dunham is on a high. He has just played to a sell-out crowd in the Texas city of San Antonio. Any other ventriloquist would be happy with an audience of a few hundred, maybe in their wildest dreams a thousand. But Dunham and his cast of dummies pulled in a whopping 19,000 fans – and every one of them seemed to have had a riotously fun evening.
“Other comedians,” he says, “must be scratching their heads and thinking, ‘How the hell is this happening?’ It’s like aliens were looking down and saying, ‘Here’s how we’re going to screw up Earth. We’ll make a reality TV guy the president – who 60% of people hate – and then, here’s something weirder, we’ll make this ventriloquist guy so successful he sells out stadiums.’”
The crowd roar with laughter when Achmed curses: ‘God damn it! I mean – Allah damn it!’
Continue ReadingFrom José the Mexican immigrant to Achmed the dead terrorist, his foul-mouthed puppets have made him one of the richest comedians on the planet. How will the ventriloquist go down in Britain?
Jeff Dunham is on a high. He has just played to a sell-out crowd in the Texas city of San Antonio. Any other ventriloquist would be happy with an audience of a few hundred, maybe in their wildest dreams a thousand. But Dunham and his cast of dummies pulled in a whopping 19,000 fans – and every one of them seemed to have had a riotously fun evening.
“Other comedians,” he says, “must be scratching their heads and thinking, ‘How the hell is this happening?’ It’s like aliens were looking down and saying, ‘Here’s how we’re going to screw up Earth. We’ll make a reality TV guy the president – who 60% of people hate – and then, here’s something weirder, we’ll make this ventriloquist guy so successful he sells out stadiums.’”
The crowd roar with laughter when Achmed curses: ‘God damn it! I mean – Allah damn it!’
Continue ReadingIt is Britain’s favourite type of humour, the go-to gag for everyone from Carry On stars to Bake Off hosts. But are fnarr fnarr jokes just another example of male sexual entitlement?
If you want a double entendre, I’ll give you one. They pop up all over the place: on risque chat shows hosted by Graham Norton and Alan Carr, on the Radio 1 mainstay Innuendo Bingo and on Mrs Brown’s Boys, the hit BBC sitcom saturated in smut that attracts seven million viewers.
You can’t watch an episode of The Great British Bake Off without having soggy bottoms, moist ladyfingers and manhandled dough balls shoved down your throat. Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins may have gone, taking with them such exclamations as “Time to reveal your cracks!”, but Noel Fielding has cheerfully filled their hole. “If there’s an opportunity for exposed bottoms, we should embrace it,” he said during his debut season. With 11 million viewers, he certainly enjoyed a big opening.
On a horse-riding holiday in Morocco, Mr Gimlet ‘paid £10 for the privilege of being tossed off by a frisky young Arab’
Continue ReadingThe writer, standup and star of Action Team on the things that make him laugh the most
Eddie Murphy Raw. A kid from school gave me a pirate copy when I was 12. I waited for my parents to go to bed and completely lost my shit. I still have it – it sits in a drawer next to my bed, like a Bible.
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