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…
Continue ReadingAward-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.
Related: Zoë Coombs Marr: why a ‘cranky lesbian in her 30s’ should be person of the year
Related: Zoë Coombs Marr, Adrienne Truscott and Ursula Martinez combine forces to eviscerate critics
Continue ReadingRoyal 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.
Related: Joe Lycett: I’m a millennial… Get me out of here!
Continue ReadingRoyal 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.
Related: Joe Lycett: I’m a millennial… Get me out of here!
Continue ReadingSoho 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.
Continue ReadingNottingham 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
Continue ReadingThe actor, writer and comedian on the things that make her laugh the most Continue reading…
Continue ReadingLeicester Square theatre, London
The celebrated standup mines her self-doubt and general bafflement with life in a fine hour of extreme idiosyncrasy
The sense of event is palpable at Leicester Square theatre before this rare UK gig for the celebrated US standup Maria Bamford. Star of her own Netflix series Lady Dynamite, and trailing “world’s funniest” superlatives from her fellow comics, Bamford is making her London debut, surprisingly – a dozen years after her last Edinburgh fringe run. And she doesn’t disappoint: this is an hour of extreme idiosyncrasy, from a comic – and, one suspects, a human being – quite incapable of looking at the world in the same way as anyone else.
Bamford performs an artless ‘song’ about the pitched battle she and her husband stage between love and mutual irritation
Continue ReadingSoho theatre, London
The standup critiques virtue-signalling modern culture in a thoughtful set argued with a light touch
‘Do you guys remember truth?” Sara Schaefer is over from America to discuss life in the eye of the post-truth, pre-apocalypse, Trumped-up maelstrom. She uses the past to illuminate the present, both publicly (pining for a time when public figures were still susceptible to shame) and privately. Schaefer was raised a zealous Christian, and her nostalgia for moral absolutes is not unrelated, she implies, to her flight from the religious certainties of her youth.
It’s a thoughtful show that becomes a lot more effective, comedy-wise, as it progresses. As Schaefer acknowledges, it starts slowly: “I’m just taking my time. I’m making it this uncomfortable on purpose.” Awkward pauses yawn between jokes; she kills the first big laugh, five minutes in, by letting it lapse into enveloping silence. Later, she apologises, citing jetlag and an anxiety attack the night before. Certainly, she’s a different performer by the halfway mark, when her critique of confrontational, virtue-signalling modern culture begins to coalesce.
Related: Sara Schaefer: the breakout comic on trashing Trump and bombing on stage
Continue ReadingOnly a handful of people can sing in this visceral, thrilling way – but the feelings they evoke are universal
The best thing I’ve ever seen, in all my long and misspent years hanging around comedy gigs, wasn’t standup. It was opera. Back in the late 90s, I was standing at the bar in one of the spit-and-stale-beer clubs where I cut my teeth, watching the MC corral the usual drunken Friday-night punters. He lighted on a woman in her early 20s at a table down the front and asked “What do you do?” “I’m an opera student,” she replied to general raucous disbelief. “Oh, yeah?” twinkled the compere, smelling pretentious blood (and what MC wouldn’t? An opera singer and a student – that, friends, is a double whammy), “Give us a song, then.” So she did. The gleeful muttering and ironic applause stuttered out when she stood and sang : Puccini’s O mio babbino caro, which, like pretty much everyone else there, I knew at that point only either as the tune from A Room With a View or an ad we couldn’t quite place.
It was incredible: the clarity of her voice, the pureness, the emotion. Such an odd and striking thing to hear in a room where most of the time what comes from the mouths of the performers is soaked in self-conscious irony. And what a reaction! I’ve never seen a four-pints-down crowd focus like that; there was a stillness to the place – a wonder, really – as she sang. And when she finished, they went crazy. Standing screaming crazy. X Factor final audience the-guy-whose-gran-died-just-won crazy.
Related: ROH’s Oliver Mears: ‘Our job is to generate an emotional reaction’
You’re listening to the most basic human tool of communication – the voice – used in an almost impossibly superhuman way
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