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Kiri Pritchard-McLean review – thorny issue tackled with sharp wit

August 11, 2017TheGuardian

Pleasance Courtyard
Voluntary work with vulnerable children is an unlikely subject for comedy but this show is packed with plenty of insights – and laughs

Even at a festival where comedians routinely tackle thorny subjects, the matter of Kiri Pritchard-McLean’s new show feels unlikely: Appropriate Adult is about her volunteer work with vulnerable children.

It chronicles her mentoring relationship with one 15-year-old girl, including reflections on her own maternal instinct and the millennial generation’s refusal to reproduce. Pritchard-McLean has form in tackling uncomfortable topics: her 2016 fringe debut addressed the vexed question of sexism in comedy. That show was good; this one’s better. Pritchard-McLean’s confidence and craft and has come on in bounds, and her new set is packed with laughs and not short of narrative incident.

Dave Johns review – heartwarming tale of late-in-life change from I, Daniel Blake star

August 10, 2017TheGuardian

Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh
Johns was ready to quit standup until Ken Loach came calling. His fringe return is full of humility and unpretentious good humour

Cinderella can’t touch this. Two years ago, Dave Johns was about to quit standup after 30 years and start selling donkey rides. Then Ken Loach came calling; according to Johns, a kestrel just appears outside your window. The rest is movie history: I, Daniel Blake – Loach’s film about benefit cuts – won 23 awards internationally, turned the tide of Britain’s political conversation, and changed Johns’ life. Our host has got an incredible rags-to-riches story to tell, and does so in this fringe return with humility, starry eyes and unpretentious good humour.

Why I wrote a comedy show about incontinence | Elaine Miller

August 10, 2017TheGuardian

As a physiotherapist, I know a third of women don’t have reliable body control. I wanted to raise awareness of this taboo subject at Edinburgh festival

I’m a physiotherapist, and as a fresh-faced graduate, my ambition was to work in elite sports. I did it, too, thriving on team spirit, travel and free trainers.

Then I had three babies in four years, each blessed with a bigger head than the one before. A dramatic sneeze during a zumba class showed me (and everyone there) that my pelvic floor had been reduced to rubble. In that excruciating instant, I realised that what really mattered was not being able to jump a tiny bit farther, or run a bit faster than others, but, being able to jump and run without wet pants.

Edinburgh festival 2017: the shows we recommend

August 9, 2017August 23, 2017TheGuardian

Plan your viewing with our list of top shows, ordered by start time. This page will be updated throughout the festival Continue reading…

Aditi Mittal review – sharp reality checks amid Bollywood and Kama Sutra gags

August 9, 2017TheGuardian

Underbelly Med Quad, Edinburgh
The standup is strongest when she eviscerates cultural cliches in this nervy but promising fringe debut

Aditi Mittal’s recent Radio 4 show was called A Beginner’s Guide to India, and it also describes what Mittal serves up for her maiden Edinburgh fringe show, Global Village Idiot.

It can feel as if Mittal, one of India’s most successful English-language standups, is performing a set required to ingratiate herself to a UK audience, rather than one that might interest her more. I look forward to the show that defines her by something other than her nationality. In the meantime, this is a tasty appetiser from a comic showing flashes of sharpness and steel amid her off-the-peg gags about Bollywood and the Kama Sutra.

Frankie Boyle review – the dark lord of comedy hits his meanest streak

August 8, 2017TheGuardian

EICC, Edinburgh
The cackling peddler of brutal jokes about the most sensitive subjects is not for the faint-hearted, but his new standup show is relentlessly funny

If you thought Frankie Boyle’s monologues on his recent BBC show New World Order were too mild, this is the show for you. Repeatedly in Prometheus Volume 1 – receiving a handful of performances on the fringe – Boyle tells us this or that joke was censored from TV. And you can believe him. This is an hour of terrifically brutal material and one only hopes the man has a strong mouthwash on hand backstage. But it’s wickedly funny. Boyle is in the meanest streak of his career – the gags are still ruthlessly well honed, but the targets are more deserving and there’s a radical worldview to back up the radical insensitivity.

Joke for joke, and assuming you have a dark sense of humour, this is one of the most relentlessly funny shows around. That’s partly because Boyle wastes no time on pleasantries. Not for him the overarching concept or autobiographical back story. It’s usually just one gag after another, each one attended by a whiff of sulphur and that strange sound you get when people laugh and recoil simultaneously. “Scotland’s Jesus”, runs the title of a recent Boyle book, but as he cackles at one more joke about paedophilia, rape or drone warfare, it’s another of the Bible’s dramatis personae – the one with the horns and the forked tail – that leaps to mind.

Jayde Adams review – she raps, she cries, she raises the roof

August 8, 2017TheGuardian

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
The outrageous standup turns a story of lifelong loneliness into an irresistible hymn to self-realisation

Elsewhere at the Edinburgh fringe, Rose Matafeo uses romcoms as a lens to view the development of her personality. For 2016 best newcomer nominee Jayde Adams, another movie genre is better suited to the job. She begins the show in dungarees, sat on a bench, struggling to open a box of chocolates. Forrest Gump is a misfit whose isolation is rendered glorious in the Tom Hanks movie; the same goes for Edward Scissorhands and the Phantom of the Opera. So why did Adams’ loneliness never feel romantic? Her new show, Jayded, recaps a lifetime of feeling unloved and at odds with the world, and her recent self-willed transformation.

From a performer whose force of personality is her USP, the show is machine-tooled to engineer supportive whoops from the crowd. As for laughs? Well, there are plenty, generated more by Adams’ outrageous behaviour (her mannerisms, her vocal tics, her antics onstage) than by joke-writing flair. She provides, in short, entertaining company, as she dragoons an audience member onstage to undertake a “best-friend test”, or struggles to practise tai chi while being for ever interrupted by a beeping phone.

Alexei Sayle review – still angry after all these years

August 7, 2017TheGuardian

Underbelly Med Quad, Edinburgh
The standup aims his moral disgust at targets including the Queen, Dominic Sandbrook and Jack Whitehall, in a hilariously mean but erudite set

Watching late-period Alexei Sayle reminds you how far intemperate moral disgust has fallen out of favour as a standup virtue. Yes, the inventor of alternative comedy (as he never stops calling himself) has mellowed a little with age: this new show contains reflective passages and there is a clearer distinction than in his heyday between a Sayle performance and a public order offence. But it’s all relative: Sayle, who has just turned 65, is still an angry old man, and one of the thrills his new show affords is the crackling tension between his avuncularity and his open hostility to a wide range of deserving targets.

He gives us fair warning, opening with a routine that draws attention to the threat posed by “Santa Claus-faced motherfuckers” like himself. They’re easy to overlook, but they’re behind most of the world’s nastiest problems. Not all of them, though: the Queen (who “pervades our civic life like a skin disease, doesn’t she?”) gets it in the neck, making an unlikely cameo in a criminal trial. And the historian Dominic Sandbrook is singled out for abuse, mainly for consistently misrepresenting the era – the 1970s and 80s – that Sayle considers his own personal fiefdom.

Tez Ilyas: ‘When comics talk about religion, it’s not very funny’

August 7, 2017TheGuardian

His show Made in Britain debunked myths about Muslims in the UK. As he returns to Edinburgh, Tez Ilyas talks about the cut and thrust of panel shows and why the fringe is like a freshers’ week for standups

Hi, Tez. This is your third standup show. What’s it all about?
In the crudest terms, the first one was about religion, the second was about culture and this is about politics. It’s called Teztify. I confront a lot of the assumptions people make about me. The main one is that I’m religious in a secular world and an extremely secular industry. I had a working-class upbringing in Blackburn, my politics are leftwing and I’m a man of colour – these are what I talk about.

From Del Boy’s cap to Steve Martin’s arrow – what happened to the comedy trademark?

August 7, 2017TheGuardian

Comedians once embraced a signature quip or look, so why have such tropes fallen out of favour?

Imagine a museum devoted to the iconography of comedy. There would be glass cases containing Del Boy’s flat cap, Father Ted’s dog collar and a perfectly preserved set of fork handles. There’d be an animatronic mannequin of Basil Fawlty, performing his impression of the Führer on a permanent loop. And on the public address system, echoing around the exhibits, a collection of immortal catchphrases: “Suits you, sir … You stupid boy … I don’t BELIEVE it.”

Related: The IT Crowd – box set review

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