Culture – Page 263 – ComedyNews.Org :: Comedy News Organization

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

Rose Matafeo: Sassy Best Friend review – fun-filled satire on romcoms

August 6, 2017TheGuardian

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
The comedian keeps things upbeat as she lightly interrogates Hollywood cliche and the role models on offer to young women

Rose Matafeo has watched a lot of romcoms, and decided that she’s classic “sassy best friend” material – hence the title of this new show. But what does that mean, and is it a good thing to be? A year on from the New Zealander’s whirlwind fringe debut with Finally Dead, this latest offering interrogates – with the lightest of touches – the personalities on offer to women, and one way in particular that those personalities can be tampered with.

Joseph Morpurgo: Hammerhead review – uproariously funny Q&A spoof

August 6, 2017TheGuardian

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
Morpurgo’s ludicrous satire on the post-show chat is so full of invention you could watch it twice and not stop laughing

Joseph Morpurgo made a name for himself with a pair of high-concept multimedia comedy shows, the second of which, Soothing Sounds for Baby (2015), is routinely talked about as one of the great Edinburgh comedy award near-misses. He returns with another sui generis offering, Hammerhead, spoofing the conventions of the post-show Q&A. I doubted how well it was doing this over the opening stages, which are big, brash and broad – as is the whole show. But I was won over once I accepted that Hammerhead follows no one’s rules but its own, and began savouring the silliness, structural intricacy and sheer bountiful invention of Morpurgo’s enterprise.

Sara Pascoe: LadsLadsLads review – breakup tales from a woman reborn

August 5, 2017TheGuardian

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
The whipsmart standup overthinks, overshares and delivers a winningly funny show that finds the humour in heartbreak

Call it reinvention, or call it back to basics, but Sara Pascoe’s Edinburgh fringe return – after a couple of years writing and promoting her book Animal – marks a departure from the shows that made her name. Those were anthropology masquerading as comedy, and wore their erudition on their sleeve. This one, entitled LadsLadsLads, is more introspective and treads ground more familiar for standup, as it chronicles Pascoe’s efforts to be happily single after the breakup of a four-year relationship. It’s still whipsmart, though, and winningly funny, as Pascoe overthinks and overshares in the name of our entertainment.

Trans tales and rogue cabarets: Edinburgh festival 2017 – in pictures

August 5, 2017TheGuardian

From Sara Pascoe’s new standup to a strange evening with Martin Creed, via acrobats, Samuel Beckett and a wild girl from Borneo, here are the sights so far

All photographs by Murdo MacLeod

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: