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Tears of clowns: who are the saddest of TV’s sad comedians?

August 25, 2017TheGuardian

Television shows built around standup comics have taken a turn for the despairing. Louis CK has a lot to answer for

“Are you havin’ a laugh?”

Not recently, no.

Jordan Brookes review – wildly entertaining standup demolishes conventions of comedy

August 24, 2017TheGuardian

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
You seldom know exactly what’s happening in this set as our host prowls the room, eyeballs the audience and wreaks confusion

Is the comedy world big enough for another Hans Teeuwen? The influence of that great Dutch disturbist is unmissable in Jordan Brookes’ new show, Body of Work, which transferred from the Free Fringe to the Pleasance and has been nominated for the Edinburgh comedy award. Like Teeuwen, Brookes is here to wreak confusion and instability – not as a substitute for laughs but as an alternative route. You seldom know exactly what’s happening. You can’t take a thing he says seriously, or can you? The register – from sweet to unruly and all points in between – changes on a dime. It’s a precipitous experience, and Brookes’ boldness and talent ensures he’s never dwarfed by the comparison to the Amsterdam man.

Mae Martin: Dope review – hair-raising comedy about romance and rehab

August 24, 2017TheGuardian

Laughing Horse @ City Cafe, Edinburgh
In a likable and thoughtful set, the Canadian standup revisits her adolescence and explores the affinities between relationships and recreational drugs

You might think Mae Martin’s appearance on this week’s Edinburgh Comedy award shortlist crowns the emergence of an exciting new talent. Scratch the “new”: now 30, the Canadian has been doing this for more than 15 years. Her show Dope takes us back to the standup apprenticeship she served as a misfit adolescent in Toronto. The way she tells it, comedy was an entry drug to, er, drugs. Teenage Martin went on the stage, off the rails and into rehab. Half a lifetime on, she explores that period, and her own obsessive personality, in a likable and thoughtful set from a performer who’s made the overlap between personal revelation and social/anthropological commentary her own.

Edinburgh comedy awards: the nominees in full

August 23, 2017TheGuardian

Female comics dominate the nine-strong shortlist for the ‘Oscars of live comedy’, as shows about a breakup, a goodbye and class consciousness make the cut

• Plan your trip: the Edinburgh 2017 shows we recommend

The Edinburgh comedy award shortlist has been announced, and it features more female comics than ever before. The nine-strong shortlist – the longest in the history of the prize – includes four women, one of whom (Elf Lyons) dresses as a parrot, and another of whom has promised never to perform standup again. The latter, Hannah Gadsby, won the prestigious Barry award at the Melbourne comedy festival and has been hotly tipped for its Edinburgh equivalent, with her hard-hitting show about gender violence and the limits of comedy. The winner will be announced on 26 August by the League of Gentlemen, who won the award in 1997.

Sophie Willan review – cheery standup skewers lazy labels

August 23, 2017TheGuardian

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
In a cracking show, Branded, Willan has an easy rapport with the audience as she interrogates her identity as a northern, female, working-class comedian

Northern, female, working-class. When Sophie Willan made her comedy debut last year, the industry pounced on her – she tells us – because of who she was, rather than what she did. “I never expected my identity to be more sellable than my talent,” she says now, introducing a cracking sophomore hour, Branded, that strains against those and other pigeonholes. It’s complex, broadly comic and thoughtful, never stinting on Willan’s trademark blunt and gossipy good cheer.

To begin, she interrogates those three identifying terms. Northern? Shorthand for nostalgic ideas about whippets and salt-of-the-earth values, against which Willan interposes modern Manchester and its love of hummus. Female? Cue dating stories, including a bathetic account of why you shouldn’t go green at a “traffic light party”. Working-class? A label whose hip-again status Willan gleefully mocks, before complicating the picture of her own background – not just the abandoned daughter of a drug-addicted mother, but also a Bolton-to-Bristol exile teased by her friends for returning home posh.

Edinburgh fringe’s funniest jokes, from 2012 to 2017 – video

August 22, 2017TheGuardian

Chuckle at officially the best gags from the Edinburgh fringe festival in recent years. From Stewart Francis’s 2012 one-liner to Ken Cheng’s 2017 triumph, all were voted winner of the Dave funniest joke of the fringe award

Ken Cheng’s pound coin gag voted Edinburgh fringe’s funniest joke

Ahir Shah review – a call to arms against political complacency

August 22, 2017TheGuardian

Laughing Horse @ Cabaret Voltaire, Edinburgh
The astute standup drills into the divided, dysfunctional state of our world in a combative hour of coruscating comedy

“I’m left, I’m liberal and I’m losing,” says Ahir Shah, but with this new show, Control, he’s not going down without a fight. It’s a piledriver hour about the rise of authoritarianism, and the eclipse of the liberal values many of us took for granted. It’s not uplifting: those looking for good cheer should look elsewhere. Shah finds plenty of laughs in the benighted state of the world, and his reaction to it – but alarm, not amusement, is the keynote. Shah is horrified, and angry, and he’s not soft-soaping that for easy laughs.

The opening stages are deceptive, as Shah warns against tarring Leave voters as racists. As his vegan-who-likes-Nando’s analogy proves, you can join bad teams for innocent reasons. But the tenor of the show contradicts this equable introduction. The deeper Shah drills into Trumpism and the nativist landscape, the more he finds racism at its root. “Take this country back” begs the question “from whom?” – and Shah thinks the answer’s obvious. Fashionable political ideas about “the common man” and the “victims of globalisation” are just code, he argues, for wanting a white monoculture.

Ken Cheng’s pound coin gag voted Edinburgh fringe’s funniest joke

August 21, 2017TheGuardian

Comedian who quit Cambridge University for online poker says both his careers are based on ‘extreme punishment or reward’

They say comedy can be found in the most banal of subjects, and the 2017 winner of Dave’s Funniest Joke of the Fringe award puts that theory to the test.

Proving that even money can be funny, Ken Cheng has won this year’s accolade with his one-liner on the UK’s redesigned currency: “I’m not a fan of the new pound coin, but then again, I hate all change.”

Iain Stirling review – the voice of Love Island speaks out

August 21, 2017TheGuardian

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
Fans have flocked to hear him spill the beans on the islanders, but instead we get some sharply expressed though extremely familiar standup material

Edinburgh native Iain Stirling has been bringing comedy shows to the fringe for most of a decade, but only this year has he sold out his four-week run in advance, and announced extra gigs in the 750-seat Pleasance Grand. So what’s new? In two words: Love Island. Stirling is the narrator of the water-cooler TV hit of the summer, and plenty are here to see him spill the beans on Chris, Camilla, Marcel and co. What they get instead is an hour of meat-and-potatoes standup from a prematurely ageing 29-year-old, whose broadsides against maturity and domesticity are as sharply expressed as they are extremely familiar.

There’s enough in the show to keep Stirling’s legion of new fans entertained. He announces himself, faux miffed, as the comic whose voice is more recognisable than his face, and is soon implying heavy scorn for Marcel Somerville’s megabucks book deal. “I’ve made idiots into millionaires,” quips our host. But he engages only skin-deeply with the Love Island phenomenon, embarking instead on a dismayed routine about the gentrification of Leith in the years since he and his teenage mates visited for a whiff of junkies-and-sex-work exoticism.

Phil Wang: Kinabalu review – patriotism, privilege and lots of lube

August 21, 2017TheGuardian

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
Ethnicity and empire are tricky subjects, but not for someone living the immigrant dream and riffing on race with a childlike glee

‘I finally became a man this year,” says 27-year-old Phil Wang, citing a first purchase of lube as the threshold to adulthood. He’s certainly come of age as a comic: the smart and funny Kinabalu is his best set by a distance, showcasing a newfound ease and confidence as he ranges across childhood memories and heroic deaths, male feminism and broodiness. And race: the show’s headline-grabbing moments find the Malaysian-born son of English and Chinese parents shelving the lube to speak against the grain about patriotism, ethnicity and empire.

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