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Jen Kirkman: ‘Joan Rivers was my comedy mother’

January 14, 2018TheGuardian

The US comic on her acid-tongued mentor, her British roots, not dating for a year and being caught up in the Louis CK scandal

Massachusetts-born, Los Angeles-based Jen Kirkman, 43, is a comedian, podcaster and bestselling author. On TV, she’s known for being a panellist on Chelsea Lately and narrator of Drunk History, while her podcast I Seem Fun gets 50,000 downloads per month. Her standup special Just Keep Livin’? recently arrived on Netflix and she brings her current tour to the UK in late January.

You’re coming over here to play a week of gigs…
I’m so excited. I’ve got some British heritage, actually. My uncle looked us up and the Kirkmans originated from Bury, outside of Manchester, before coming to America in the 19th century. I haven’t visited Bury yet but I’ve been to Manchester and loved it. They were a great audience. No offence but they seemed a little more loosened-up than in London. These are my people.

Twelve years ago, Louis CK said something creepy to me which definitely tallies with things he’s since admitted to

Lucy Pearman: ‘I gave Mick Quinn from Supergrass one very big testicle’

January 12, 2018TheGuardian

The standup and one half of sketch duo LetLuce on the things that make her laugh the most Continue reading…

‘Nothing was off-limits’: Mark Thomas on his West Bank comedy club

January 12, 2018TheGuardian

When the activist-standup put on a comedy show in a refugee camp in Jenin, the jokes he heard were angry, funny – and radical

The first time I went to Jenin was when we did the Walking the Wall project – to hike the length of Israel’s wall in the West Bank. When we started, I was hugely worried about it all – we didn’t know whether we could do it, we didn’t know what the experience would be. We walked each day with translators and a lot of them didn’t understand what we were trying to do, which was partly our fault for not explaining it properly, but also because rambling isn’t a big pastime in the West Bank.

The only person who seemed to understand it was Juliano Mer-Khamis, the director of the Jenin Freedom theatre. I had gone there on the urging of a friend, and because I was intrigued by the idea of this theatre in a refugee camp. When we arrived and told Juliano what we were doing and why – how we were trying to talk to as many people on our journey as possible – he said: “Oh fuck, we were going to do that.” We got on like a house on fire and I loved what they were doing. Juliano was charismatic and would talk about human rights being at the centre of the work. And true to his word, the first production they put on was Animal Farm, as an obvious critique of the Palestinian National Authority.

We put on our show in the middle of the Palestinian prisoners’ hunger strike – people questioned whether we should do it

Different Party review – artful take on the absurdity of office life

January 11, 2018TheGuardian

Soho theatre, London
The drudgery of bureaucracy is sent up with great expressivity, loose-limbed flair and a heightened sense of the ridiculous

Absurdist takes on the office environment are as old as the office itself. From Herman Melville’s Bartleby via David Brent to the award-winning theatre show Paperweight, there’s a noble tradition of artists sending up the ritualistic drudgery of – well, almost everyone else’s working life. Now, New Zealand physical comics Trygve Wakenshaw and Barnie Duncan bring us their contribution to the genre, an hour of slapstick bureaucracy that has little new to say about office life, but says it with great expressivity and a heightened sense of the ridiculous.

Presented as part of the London international mime festival, it begins as it means to go on, with Wakenshaw (gangly, too big for his suit) and Duncan (stubby, too little for his) making as if their briefcases are frisky dogs. It’s artfully done and – like the later routines in which the cases float, or refuse to move – it might have been performed at any time since the salad days of music hall. Fuelling the old-school vibe, Wakenshaw and Duncan’s office is curiously retro: at Ruck’s Leather Interiors, orders are taken by phone, paper billows out of filing cabinets and there are no computers in sight.

Robert Newman: Total Eclipse of Descartes review – philosophical funnies

January 10, 2018TheGuardian

Soho theatre, London
An infinite number of monkeys, Pavlov’s dogs and Cartesian thought are gleefully debunked in a jaunty and refreshingly intelligent show

At the start of his comedy career, Robert Newman was famous – with partner David Baddiel – for a sketch called History Today in which they played fogeyish academics dissing each other’s mums. Twenty-five years later, it’s history every day for a comedian – a little less famous now – whose successive shows delve deeper into the past to fathom the dodgy politics of the present. His new set, Total Eclipse of Descartes, like its two predecessors, takes aim at what Newman sees as a rationalist fallacy – in this case, the body/brain duality as proposed by the titular 17th-century philosopher. On Descartes’ flawed logic, he blames the centuries of human exceptionalism that followed and much of the “macho sadistic melodrama” that passes for science today.

Newman’s gone on a twisty journey over the past two decades, first fleeing from success, then edging back to it through his novels, activism and wilfully uncommercial boffin-standup with a ukulele garnish. Having pioneered stadium comedy with Baddiel, Newman is now as likely to be found on an arena stage as … well, as Michael McIntyre is to deconstruct Cartesian thought. And yet he’s still got comedy chops. The new show isn’t just an intellectually restless tour of the sterility of three centuries of philosophy, it’s got jokes, too, some of them as childishly silly as History Today.

Sophie Willan: who are you calling a northern working-class comic?

January 9, 2018TheGuardian

Her childhood in care, her mother’s heroin addiction, her days as a sex worker … Bolton comedian Sophie Willan is turning the details of her life into dazzling standup

It’s great to have Sophie Willan’s working-class voice in the comedy industry. That’s not (just) me talking, that’s how “loads of people” have greeted the Lancastrian since her standup debut in 2016. “Some people are quite up for being pigeonholed like that,” says Willan. “But I think nuance is important.”

What do onlookers mean when they peg Willan as “northern” and “working-class”? How accurately can those labels describe any of us? Those are the questions posed by her second show, Branded, which tours next month. With it, Willan enacts phase two of her manifesto, as she calls it, to bring authentic working-class voices into the mainstream – while questioning why those voices are momentarily hip again.

Working class may be ‘cool’ now, but ‘they want your identity and your story, but not the personality that goes with it’

Omid Djalili – cheesy gags and silly dancing from a lovable schmuck

January 9, 2018TheGuardian

Leicester Square theatre, London
The convivial comic serves up a hotchpotch of creaking jokes, funny accents and satire – but not all his fans can stomach it

‘I’ve been heckled, I’ve been physically attacked,” says Omid Djalili from the stage, “but I’ve never before been overcome by fumes.” Tonight, he is, after his most vocal fan in the second row vomits 20 minutes before the end of his set. Everyone within a five-metre radius scatters; the drunken offender staggers to the exit; Djalili temporises, uncertain whether the gig can continue.

It can, albeit through a pukey miasma: Djalili delivers his closing routines from behind a mask improvised from his T-shirt. It’s not the finale anyone would fantasise for the first night of their London run – nearly two years after the Anglo-Iranian comic started touring Schmuck for a Night. But nor is it a disaster for Djalili, whose entertaining but unexceptional show has been given an unearned slice of “you had to be there”.

Angus Gordon and Aaron Chen review – kings of cringe fascinate and frustrate

January 8, 2018TheGuardian

Soho theatre, London
The award-winning Aussie duo flout standup’s conventions to mine laughs from misery and nihilism. It’s certainly bold – but can you get too much of a bad thing?

The list of best newcomer winners at the Melbourne comedy festival doesn’t exactly heave with famous names – not to people in the northern hemisphere, at least. But there are a few, including Flight of the Conchords and Daily Show correspondent Ronnie Chieng. Will the names Angus Gordon and Aaron Chen one day trip as easily from the tongue? On the basis of this double-billed UK debut, you’d probably hedge your bets. Yet you can see what swayed the judges: Gordon and Chen are distinctive personalities, with ambitious new angles on the art of standup.

But they’re also both, to some degree, anti-comics: performers who scorn the conventions of standup and prompt the kind of nervous laugh generated by material more painful or inept than outright funny. Anti-comedy has a distinguished lineage, from Andy Kaufman via Gregg Turkington’s dyspeptic alter ego Neil Hamburger to the monotonous Brit Edward Aczel. That’s the ballpark we’re in this evening: discomfort in place of mirth. As Gordon says at the top of his set (looping in Chen’s sidekick Jon Lo): “We’re just three variations on Australian awkwardness.” Which, after an hour and 40 minutes, doesn’t seem like much variation at all.

Ahir Shah: ‘The funniest number? £350m, in a gallows humour sort of way’

January 5, 2018TheGuardian

The 2017 Edinburgh comedy award nominee on the things that make him laugh the most

Doug Stanhope, Emo Philips, Reginald D Hunter and Adam Hess are the only comedians who have made me laugh so much I couldn’t breathe. I don’t know if this is a compliment.

Dave Chappelle’s ‘reckless’ #MeToo and trans jokes have real after-effects

January 4, 2018TheGuardian

In his Netflix shows the comic defends his right to provoke, but protests against his gags about misconduct allegations and transgender people are justified

Dave Chappelle’s first Netflix specials, released last spring, left his reputation in need of recovery. Those two sets were widely criticised for their transphobia. Suddenly, a comic once considered radical for his super-smart critiques of race in America was toeing a conservative line on a new generation’s struggle for social justice. But now Chappelle’s back with two more Netflix offerings – and he’s not in the business of recovering his reputation at all. At least, not in the way you might expect.

Yes, in the first of the specials, Equanimity, he addresses the row over his trans material. “You know who hates me the most?” he asks. “The transgender community.” He’s not here to express regret. He likes transgender people, he says, and supports their struggle to live equally and without fear. But he reserves the right to joke at their expense. And he does so, once more from the vantage point of a self-satisfied straight guy who finds their identity inherently comical.

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