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Margaret Cho review – a scorching, full-frontal comedy carnival

November 29, 2017TheGuardian

Comedy Box, Bristol
After spending a year in rehab, Cho returns to the mic and tackles Weinstein and Trump, leaving prudery and inhibition in her wake

Since her last UK visit, Korean-American comic Margaret Cho has spent over a year in rehab, after friends intervened to rescue her from drugs and suicidal impulses. She had to apologise for a New Jersey gig last year that ended in a “bizarre onstage meltdown”, and a slanging match between Cho and her audience. One punter protested that her rape jokes were inappropriate for Easter weekend, to which pious heckle – 18 months later and a continent away – she tonight delivers an outrageously transgressive response.

So yes, the 48-year-old is now clean, sober and back behind the microphone, and her style and onstage manner are less attention-seeking than in the past. But there’s nothing rehabilitated about the content of Fresh Off the Bloat, which is as filthy and full-frontal as we’ve come to expect of Cho. The material ranges across sex, sexual abuse and scatology, and is dispatched with sometimes beautiful economy.

Margaret Cho: ‘I love Pauline and her pens from The League of Gentlemen’

November 24, 2017TheGuardian

The American standup and actor on the things that make her laugh the most, from Paul Foot to her mother

It was Paul Foot’s private show for specially selected audience members at a small pub in London. The show began with Paul seating the audience, then making jokes about each of them. It was incredible.

Billy Connolly at 75: Eddie Izzard, Armando Iannucci and more salute ‘Beatles of comedy’

November 24, 2017TheGuardian

Izzard was inspired by his incontinence knickers routine. Iannucci had to listen to his albums in secret. Al Murray was in awe of his rampant charisma. And he made Susan Calman hurt with laughter. Top comedians salute the Big Yin Continue reading…

Comedy in a care home: the standups taking slapstick into new territory

November 21, 2017TheGuardian

The residents were expecting bingo. Instead they got lessons in strawberry spitting, a Railway Children spoof – and a stuntman stripping to his underpants…

Monday afternoon is usually bingo time at the Madelayne Court care home, in the village of Broomfield, near Chelmsford. So today’s activity comes as a surprise to many comfortably seated residents: striding on stage in front of them is former Neighbours actor Nathan Lang – he’s dressed as a stuntman and preparing to leap through a hoop he’s pretending is on fire.

“You’ve lost it!” hollers one elderly spectator, and Lang does look momentarily perplexed. How do you deal with hecklers here?

‘What responses will they get? says a resident called Margaret. ‘Probably dead silence’

‘Ever milked a cow?’ Helen Duff asks a woman called Audrey – and suddenly memories of her life on a farm re-emerge

Ronny Chieng review – Daily Show comic’s slick set is derailed by a heckle

November 21, 2017TheGuardian

Soho theatre, London
The standup and International Student sitcom star delivers jaunty routines about US life but the show suffers when he reacts to a heckler

“I have a tone problem,” reckons Ronny Chieng: everything he says sounds angry or sarcastic. In the past, that’s been to the detriment of his standup, but it’s less the case here in his first London outing since becoming a correspondent on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. He dials down the scorn (a little) in this set, which is going with a swing – until he gets heckled for a routine defending the “creepy” amorous behaviour of the teenage male, at which point his tone problem resurfaces to unpleasant effect.

If you’re coming at him via his sitcom, International Student – routinely described as sweet and charming – you’ll barely recognise onstage Chieng. Slick and high-handed, he kicks off with an extended routine about living in the States: a land of consumerist abundance and turbo-charged convenience.

Sarah Silverman: ‘Jokes I made 15 years ago I’d not make today’

November 19, 2017TheGuardian

Sarah Silverman’s comedy has always aimed a laser into the dark corners of sexism, racism and religion. But now she’s using her wit to make sense of the huge issues facing America. Sophie Heawood meets her in Hollywood

Arriving at the Hollywood studio complex where Sarah Silverman has her office, I am surprised to find nobody can tell me where it is. She’s one of the biggest comedians in America, but it takes 15 minutes of shrugged shoulders and wrong turns before I find a door with a handwritten sign: “If you feel unwell turn around and go home and rest! Do not walk thru this door! You are loved, feel better! Sarah!” So far, so adorable.

Germs and visitors might struggle to make their way past reception, but dogs are clearly welcomed like sacred Indian cows here: two of them trot past me unaccompanied. The animals have just left a script meeting in the writers’ room, soon to be followed by a gaggle of comedy writers, including Silverman herself, who is wearing glasses and stopping to stare at her phone. Once installed on the sofa in her own room, with an assistant bringing her black tea, she admits she didn’t realise this interview was in person, hence the phone. “But you’re here!” she says, getting her legs comfy on the furniture. “Great!” Her impromptu welcome is so friendly and her smile so full of shiny teeth, that it only occurs to me afterwards that she might be lying through them – surely nobody wants to be surprised by a journalist.

I live in a little apartment and the washer dryer for the whole floor is in the hallway

I saw my boss was fully jerking off in front of me. And I just said… ‘I have to clean the popcorn machine’

Putting people into power who are addicted to money is like giving cokeheads mountains of cocaine

Greg Davies review – supremely silly standup shouts the unsayable

November 17, 2017TheGuardian

Hammersmith Apollo, London
In an exuberant new show, Davies scrutinises his own ridiculousness and goes from outre stories about his mum to a musical tribute to his dad

Greg Davies has got a trigger warning at the start of his show for every section of his fanbase. If you love him for The Inbetweeners or Man Down, you’ll be fine. Fans of Taskmaster – and of Cuckoo, even more so – may find his outre stage persona hotter to handle. This is big, delinquent and often blue comedy from the former We Are Klang man. The material would seem juvenile from a performer half his age (he’s 49), but it is largely redeemed by Davies’ infectious sense of fun and of his own ridiculousness. Life is forever ambushing this arrested developer with more evidence of his own and other people’s flamboyant idiocy – and his eagerness to share his findings is easy to submit to.

I’d call him the Peter Pan of comedy, but – what with all the farting and wanking gags – the JM Barrie estate might demur. At any rate, he gleefully avoids the road well travelled by middle-aged comics, towards world weariness and carping about how distasteful young people are. His stock-in-trade remains jokes about his mum and dad, which is good going for a near 50-year-old, the more so given that his dad died three years ago – a bereavement from which his standup show You Magnificent Beast draws its modest emotional charge. It culminates in a musical tribute to Davies’ eccentric father. But before then it’s bound only by a tenuous motif about how each of us is judged on things we might not expect and cannot control.

Lloyd Griffith: ‘I love both Mick Hucknall and Grimsby Town’

November 17, 2017TheGuardian

The standup, TV presenter and choirboy on the things that make him laugh the most

Matt Lucas as George Dawes in Shooting Stars singing Peanuts. Whenever I’m feeling down I always watch it and, by ’eck, it makes me smile.

As a comic, Al Franken joked about rape, sex robots and Afghan women

November 16, 2017TheGuardian

The Minnesota senator has apologised following allegations of sexual misconduct, and it is not the first example of his attitudes about women and sex

Senator Al Franken of Minnesota apologised on Thursday after being accused of sexually harassing the journalist Leeann Tweeden in 2006, highlighting the comedian-turned-politician’s past history of crass jokes towards women.

Are you gruesome tonight? The comedy hit splicing Evil Dead 2 and Elvis songs

November 14, 2017TheGuardian

In Sam Raimi’s horror classic, a man is tormented by demons and his own severed hand. All the story needed was a few tunes by the king of rock’n’roll, says Rob Kemp

By day, he was a mild-mannered examinations officer at a school near Wolverhampton. By night, he was a chainsaw-wielding maniac with a soft spot for Elvis numbers. No, that’s not a pitch for a B-movie, but the life of standup comic Rob Kemp. The 39-year-old will spend much of the next month commuting between the West Midlands and Soho theatre in London, shedding the briefcase and tie en route to re-enter the underworld of The Elvis Dead, his rock’n’roll-meets-horror one-man comedy show that became the cult hit of this summer’s Edinburgh fringe.

Hitherto, Kemp had been a specialist in “whimsical” (so he’s told) standup and was “bumping along largely unnoticed”. His only previous show, little seen, was a Dave Gorman-esque comedy lecture about hubris. The Elvis Dead (it’s a retelling of Evil Dead 2 set to the music of Elvis Presley) was dreamed up in conversation with a friend, based on Kemp’s supposed resemblance to horror icon Bruce Campbell. “There was nothing cynical about it,” he says, in case you’re thinking that the Elvis/Evil Dead mashup was a ruthlessly commercial cash-in. “I just wanted to write something that I knew my mates would enjoy.”

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