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Penn & Teller’s smug shtick and Sadowitz’s twisted tricks: magicians conjuring with comedy

June 28, 2017TheGuardian

The American duo’s slick act shimmers with Vegas-style glitz, while the Scottish standup’s sleight of hand is as flabbergasting as his vicious jokes

The classic magician image, we are told in Penn and Teller’s new show, was established by the French conjuror Robert-Houdin in the mid 19th century. But who, in the post-Paul Daniels era of postmodern magic, bothers with top hat and tails any more? These days, magic comes at us in all shapes and sizes.

At the Robert-Houdin end of the spectrum – smart suits, if not tuxedos – Penn and Teller brought a little bit of Vegas to the Hammersmith Apollo this month, in a characteristically high-end two hours of trickery. Yes, their patter (well, Penn’s patter; Teller is silent) defers to the modern requirement that magicians debunk the supernatural and mock the credulous, but their iconoclasm is strictly rationed. Theirs is a traditional magic show, and they relish their high status to the point of smugness, delighting in duping their audience.

Steven Wright, master of meh: ‘This is just how I talk. It accidentally went well with the jokes’

June 26, 2017TheGuardian

The big-haired, sleepy-eyed standup is an Oscar-winner, one of America’s best-loved comedians and ‘a car that has no gears’. Now, his deadpan style has won him a perfect role in The Emoji Movie

There are answers, and there are Steven Wright answers. Who else – responding to questions over the phone from London to Rhode Island, where he loves to vacation – would compare owning an Oscar statuette to “seeing Neil Armstrong bouncing down your driveway as if he was walking on the moon”? Who else, reflecting on 38 years as one of America’s best-loved standups, would describe themselves as “a car that has no gears”. Wright elaborates: “I just started at an open mic night in the 1970s and I’m still going, still doing now what I started to do then. I know other people might look up to me. But really, I’m just me after a bit of time has gone by.”

That’s true, to a large extent: Wright’s comic style has remained remarkably consistent over four decades. But the 62-year-old isn’t being “just me” right now. He’s being an emoji, in an animated movie to be released this summer. That’s where the transformation ends, however, given that the deadpan-bordering-on-catatonic Wright has been cast as Meh, the only emoji characterised by a complete lack of emotion.

Chris Rock’s Total Blackout review – blistering start to a new world tour

June 26, 2017TheGuardian

Perth Arena
More than joke machine, Oscar host, even talking zebra, this standup legend is one of his generation’s most incendiary speakers

Chris Rock may need no introduction but apparently he still fancies a warm-up.

The evening before his performance in front of 8,000 people at the Perth Arena, where tickets ranged from $95 to $145 (not including the dreaded booking fee), the American comic swung by a local pub, the Charles hotel, to do a surprise set at their $20 comedy night.

Sofie Hagen: ‘I was a chubby, white four-year-old, talking like Will Smith’

June 23, 2017TheGuardian

The Danish comedian and podcast host on the things that make her laugh the most, from Will Smith to The Green ButchersIrish comic Alison Spittle. She will candidly talk about peeing in a pint glass during a mental breakdown and it will make you laugh w…

Jimmy Carr’s ‘greatest hits’: 15 years of thuggish jokes and tawdry stereotypes

June 22, 2017TheGuardian

In a long-running tour, the supercilious standup brings back old gags, leaving a bad smell – and a loveless worldview – in his wake

‘I’m jealous of bands,” Jimmy Carr told the NME when his current tour was conceived, 18 months ago. “You go and see a band, and they knock out the hits. And you think: I wish I could do that …” It turns out he could: he’s now deep into a tour entitled The Best of, Ultimate, Gold, Greatest Hits, which unites favourite gags from 15 years of off-colour standup. It’s a relatively new idea to comedy, which, conventional wisdom tells us, thrives on novelty and surprise. But there’s clearly an audience out there willing to laugh at the same jokes over and again, and Carr – as usual – has been quick to exploit the commercial opportunity.

It doesn’t feel like a treat to hear these jokes again, because they’re not exactly well loved in the first place

Ronny Chieng on International Student and testing the limits of The Daily Show

June 18, 2017TheGuardian

Playing himself might be the ‘easiest job in the world’, but the boyish-looking, sick burn-delivering comic has been reliving some excruciating memories

On stage and screen, the comedian Ronny Chieng is famously irritable. A senior correspondent on America’s beloved news satire The Daily Show, and titular star of ABC’s Ronny Chieng: International Student, the short, boyish-looking, sick burn-delivering comic has the querulous demeanour of a man prone to outrage and allergic to pleasantries.

The 31-year-old Malaysian has been like that since his first public (non-university) gig, at a tiny, dingy, subterranean Melbourne comedy room in 2009, performing a slightly rinkydink set in front of a crowd of approximately eight people. I know, because I was one of them.

Tonight at 11/10c, correspondent Ronny Chieng reports on the Fox News/Jesse Watters racist Chinatown segment. pic.twitter.com/FTq8HyJ0KD

Half the country hate you immediately, no matter what you say. You kind of realise every day is transient

Jenny Slate: ‘Ivanka Trump is a fake feminist and should be ashamed’

June 18, 2017TheGuardian

The US actor, standup and author on her new film, Gifted, rescuing her career after being fired from Saturday Night Live, inspirational women and the terrifying situation in the White House

Jenny Slate, 35, is an American comedian, actor and author. The middle of three sisters, with a ceramicist mother and poet father, she was raised in Milton, Massachusetts. While at Columbia University, Slate performed standup and improv. Moving to Los Angeles with then-husband, director Dean Fleischer-Camp (they’ve since amicably divorced), Slate joined Saturday Night Live in 2009, but accidentally swore in her first episode and was fired after one season. A stop-motion short animation made with Fleischer-Camp, Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, became a viral hit, leading to New York Times bestseller children’s books and plans for a feature-length movie.

With her distinctive voice, Slate featured in Zootopia and The Secret Life of Pets. On television, she appeared in Parks and Recreation, Married and Girls. Her performance in Gillian Robespierre’s Obvious Child, playing a comic navigating a pregnancy termination, won her awards including the Critics’ Choice award for best actress in a comedy. Slate stars in another Robespierre film, Landline, due out in the summer. In her latest film, Gifted, she plays a teacher who becomes involved with a man (Chris Evans) caring for his maths prodigy niece (Mckenna Grace).

Joseph Morpurgo: ‘I once got dive-bombed by a bird on stage’

June 16, 2017TheGuardian

The cult character comic on the things that make him laugh the most, from Corbyn kebabs to Hans Teeuwen

The [00s MTV sketch show] Human Giant deserves more shine than it gets. My favourites are Mother & Son Moving Company and Let’s Go.

Dying Laughing review – savagely funny documentary about standup

June 16, 2017TheGuardian

Sarah Silverman, Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Stewart Lee, Garry Shandling and Victoria Wood feature in this film about the craft and catharsis of comedy

A murderer’s row of standup talent has been assembled for this documentary on the craft and catharsis of comedy. Chris Rock, Steve Coogan, Jerry Seinfeld, Sarah Silverman and Stewart Lee are among the many faces providing testimony to the euphoria and agony that telling jokes to a group of strangers can bring. The film is stronger on the latter point, with some savagely funny accounts of the many ways that comedians deal with hecklers, and one devastating account of a gig going horribly wrong.

The endless conveyor belt of talking heads does rather lose its lustre over time, and some actual standup would have been welcome, but there’s a dizzying amount of insight, not to mention a real poignancy to some of the contributors: including Garry Shandling and Victoria Wood, both of whom died in 2016.

The must-see standup of summer 2017: Daniel Kitson, Sara Pascoe, Rob Delaney and more

June 13, 2017TheGuardian

The star of Catastrophe brings carnality, the elusive Kitson attempts to ‘alter language’, Sara Pascoe goes dating, while Hannah Gadsby goes out with a bang

Penn and Teller
Las Vegas’s loss is Britain’s gain, as the veteran magic double-act return for UK tour. Publicity has focused on Penn Jillette’s relationship with the US president, with whom he worked on Celebrity Apprentice in 2012. “We wish we could make Trump disappear,” ran the headlines. That’s not, unfortunately, the prospectus for their new show, which should feature the usual impressive combination of jazzy set pieces hyped by Penn and tender conjuring vignettes by Teller.
• At Hammersmith Apollo, London, 20-25 June. Box office: 0844-249 4300.

Rob Delaney
When he first gigged in the UK, the American comic Rob Delaney was mainly famous for being funny on Twitter. Two years ago, cresting Channel 4’s hit show Catastrophe, he delivered a depraved (his word) standup show entitled Meat. This summer, that carnival of carnality is back.
• At Leicester Square theatre, London, 5-15 July. Box office: 020-7734 2222.

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