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Lil Dicky and the truth about comedy rap – it’s tricky!

April 13, 2018TheGuardian

Comedy rapper Lil Dicky has reached No 1, adding to successes such as Big Shaq and the Lonely Island. But as Honey G’s example shows, doing funny rhymes right takes sophistication

‘He’s not like a ‘rapper’ rapper,” the guy in the restaurant explains to his unimpressed girlfriend. “He’s like a ‘funny’ rapper.”

Those two statements – true and open to debate respectively – are from the opening scene of the video to Lil Dicky’s Freaky Friday, which is this week’s UK No 1 single, and which on Monday crossed 100m YouTube views, and will soon join its thriftiness-espousing predecessor $ave Dat Money in passing the same number of Spotify plays.

Tom Allen review – quick-witted master of the nonstop rant

April 12, 2018TheGuardian

Soho theatre, London
Allen’s amiable routines about gay and working-class stereotyping foreground his abundant skills as a raconteur

If Tom Allen weren’t already hosting a primetime Saturday night TV show, you’d have to invent one for him. Thirteen years a standup, the Bromley man deploys a similar old-school, unthreatening camp and faux-imperious manner that Larry Grayson brought to The Generation Game. It’s a crowdpleasing combination and Allen wears it as elegantly as his soigné three-piece tweed suit. Now a host (one of several) on BBC1’s new prank-the-public gameshow Ready or Not, Allen is still touring his 2017 show Absolutely, itself a well-honed nugget of light entertainment and now running for a fortnight at Soho theatre, before another series of dates in July.

You leave wholly persuaded by Allen’s skills as an entertainer – even if he sometimes has to flog them hard to sell so-so material. He starts by setting out his stall. A chat with punters in the front row establishes his quick wit and his egoism; he feigns exhaustion with talking about anything but himself. He gives an account of his stage manner: posh voice but coarse background, and unapologetically fey. “I’ve finally made it as a gay stereotype!” There’s nothing simpering about Allen, mind you: he practically barks the opening 10 minutes of material and throughout, his voice is deployed – now singsong, now stentorian – very adroitly as a comic instrument.

The best films about standup: from King of Comedy to Funny Bones

April 12, 2018TheGuardian

As Maxine Peake takes the mic to play a club comic in Funny Cow, here are five movies that capture the lacerating, soul-baring world of live comedy

There’s something so intimate, exposing and ruthless about their artform that standups make perfect symbols for the battle we all wage to assert ourselves against an unappreciative world. So most movies about standup focus on failures rather than successes – none more so than King of Comedy, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro’s less celebrated follow-up to Taxi Driver and Raging Bull.

Bilal Zafar: ‘I was heckled by a fireworks display’

April 6, 2018TheGuardian

The standup and actor on the things that make him laugh the most, from terrible tofu dinners to Shooting StarsDinner Party Conspiracy from The Armando Iannucci Show. A brilliant series but that sketch stands out. Continue reading…

Bilal Zafar: ‘I was heckled by a fireworks display’

April 6, 2018TheGuardian

The standup and actor on the things that make him laugh the most, from terrible tofu dinners to Shooting StarsDinner Party Conspiracy from The Armando Iannucci Show. A brilliant series but that sketch stands out. Continue reading…

Zoë Coombs Marr: Bossy Bottom review – a surprising (and silly) reinvention of standup

April 5, 2018TheGuardian

Award-winning comedian sheds her alter ego ‘Dave’ but is no less critical of the brash, male-dominated cult of standup

Before the premiere of her new show, Bossy Bottom, Australian comedian Zoë Coombs Marr tweeted that the last time she played the Melbourne comedy festival “I sold out and won the Barry”, but “this time I plan on doing an unremarkable season to undersold houses just to prove I still can”.

For the last six years, Coombs Marr has been performing as “Dave”: a caricature of a bad male comedian, patchy beard, sexist remarks and all.

Joe Lycett review – pansexual gadfly tickles the pompous

April 2, 2018TheGuardian

Royal and Derngate, Northampton
The naturally funny panel-show regular inhabits a small world, but he makes those narrow horizons teem with possibility and comic life

When Mark Thomas engages in activist comedy, he won’t be satisfied until laws are revoked or politicians’ heads roll. For Joe Lycett, it’s fine if he gets a few retweets or if the branch manager of the local bank gets the slight hump. A rage for change isn’t what powers panel show regular Lycett: you’d have a job finding a comic happier with himself and how things are. Pottering away in his home in a suburb of Birmingham, he craves no greater impact than to make people laugh, pester killjoys and lay bare how bad guys aren’t just bad, but usually humourless, too.

And he does it really well. If one marker of good comedy is making it seem effortless – not an artifice at all, just a naturally funny person chatting from the stage – then Lycett is among the best we’ve got. In his touring show, he has nothing urgent to communicate and few jokes, while his routines rarely seem to go anywhere. But he’ll have you chuckling near-constantly with perky tales of setting up in aspirational Kings Heath, pranks sprung on him by his schoolfriend Peter and by his various juvenile online tricks to peeve the slightly powerful or bring down scoundrels by a peg or two.

Joe Lycett review – pansexual gadfly tickles the pompous

April 2, 2018TheGuardian

Royal and Derngate, Northampton
The naturally funny panel-show regular inhabits a small world, but he makes those narrow horizons teem with possibility and comic life

When Mark Thomas engages in activist comedy, he won’t be satisfied until laws are revoked or politicians’ heads roll. For Joe Lycett, it’s fine if he gets a few retweets or if the branch manager of the local bank gets the slight hump. A rage for change isn’t what powers panel show regular Lycett: you’d have a job finding a comic happier with himself and how things are. Pottering away in his home in a suburb of Birmingham, he craves no greater impact than to make people laugh, pester killjoys and lay bare how bad guys aren’t just bad, but usually humourless, too.

And he does it really well. If one marker of good comedy is making it seem effortless – not an artifice at all, just a naturally funny person chatting from the stage – then Lycett is among the best we’ve got. In his touring show, he has nothing urgent to communicate and few jokes, while his routines rarely seem to go anywhere. But he’ll have you chuckling near-constantly with perky tales of setting up in aspirational Kings Heath, pranks sprung on him by his schoolfriend Peter and by his various juvenile online tricks to peeve the slightly powerful or bring down scoundrels by a peg or two.

Tez Ilyas review – cheeky chappie takes on British Muslim identity

April 1, 2018TheGuardian

Soho theatre, London
His new show Teztify is a jumble of familiar, subversive and incongruous humour, put it all pulls together for a powerful denouement

Tez Ilyas’s touring show Teztify begins with a montage of news stories about Islamophobia. We get clips of the Finsbury Park mosque attack, of US white supremacist Richard Spencer. It’s strong stuff, and establishes a tone of moral seriousness to which it’s hard to see cheeky chappie Ilyas living up. Then comes his opening routine, which flogs a smutty play on the word “popcorn” to within an inch of its life, and makes that earlier scene-setting seem more incongruous still.

But Ilyas pulls it round. Teztify, like his 2016 offering Made in Britain, is an accomplished standup set, whose jaunty lite-ent stylings only partially conceal a commitment to defending and celebrating British Muslims. It’s framed by a story of a visit to McDonald’s in Blackburn with our host’s niece and nephew. Ilyas has just relocated to Lancashire from melting-pot London, and is ill-prepared when a fellow customer turns on him with an aggressive, seemingly Islamophobic remark.

Michael McIntyre review – master of the mundane gets stuck in first gear

March 25, 2018TheGuardian

Nottingham Arena
McIntyre’s endearing observations and self-mockery remain, but there’s an inescapable sense of deja vu in a show that breaks no new ground

Michael McIntyre’s Big World Tour, it’s called – and the does-what-it-says-on-the-tin title is characteristic. McIntyre has been delivering exactly what people expect of him for well over a decade, and does so again tonight, with a show that deviates not one iota from the established formula. Fair enough: no one who likes what he does will be disappointed. But nor will they be surprised, as the king of primetime dispatches another 85 minutes of perky observations about family life, smartphones and bad traffic.

Increasingly it feels as if McIntyre’s most remarkable achievement is to keep finding new things to notice in domestic custom and everyday human (or should that be British?) behaviour. When he riffs here on taking a bath, or de-icing the windscreen, you think: surely he’s covered this before? But he retains the knack of making dull things effervesce. OK, the windscreen skit is more observations than jokes (he straw-polls the audience for favoured de-icing methods). But the hot-tub routine is a hit, drawing on McIntyre’s physical comedy skills as he “hover-paddles” above his scalding bath, testing the temperature with a delicate part of the male anatomy.

An interminable routine about traffic jams feels like being stuck in one

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