‘People were baffled and scared’: Robin Ince on the vital failure of his Edinburgh festival debut

Nineteen years since his first fringe solo show, the comedian returns to riff on punching melons – but this time with a hard-won happinessMy career was transformed when I repeatedly punched a melon with the face of Vernon Kay amateurishly scrawled on i…

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Aditi Mittal review – rich people’s problems upstage lockdown laughs

Soho theatre, LondonThe Indian standup’s Unalive show is stronger for its satire on her native country’s super-rich than its mild, middling musings on coronavirus A show of two halves, this one, from Indian standup Aditi Mittal, who rakes over Covid co…

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‘My reproductive life is over? That’s liberating!’ Bridget Christie on comedy, TV and the menopause

What’s it like to break into television in your 50s? The award-winning standup talks about her new series The Change, her late-blooming career and her issues with TupperwareThere is a photograph of Bridget Christie and her siblings, she says, taken in …

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Alison Spittle: ‘Think of the most shameful thing you have done, then imagine your mum watching!’

The Irish comedian on good gigs, bad gigs, her standup heroes and what makes a good soupHow did you get your start in standup?I did work experience at a radio station when I was in college. The breakfast DJ was Bernard O’Shea, a big comedian in Ireland…

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Dough: David Lescot’s play weighs a man’s life in his bank balance

We follow our loser hero from tooth fairy credits to funeral debts in a comedy of financial errors exploring money as a transactional link through all relationshipsThe award-winning French author, director and composer David Lescot’s play Dough is all …

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‘I like to slag off the headliner’: what is it like to do standup at a music festival?

Comedians Sophie Duker and Jacob Hawley discuss how to draw revellers away from pop stars while Glastonbury’s Charlotte Lang explains what it takes to win over the cabaret tentYou’re in a massive tent. People are walking in and out, chatting, spilling …

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‘Maybe I’m a prude now!’: Graham Norton on drag, dreams, death and desire

The genial face of chatshow TV is back with Queen of the Universe. He discusses the joy of Eurovision, his late start as a novelist – and his even later marriageThe second series of Queen of the Universe, the drag queen singing competition hosted by Gr…

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Nick Offerman: ‘I was told I’d never not be Ron Swanson’

Parks and Recreation gave the midwestern actor the role of a lifetime – one that he struggled to escape. But now, with a stunning standalone episode of The Last Of Us and a new standup tour, he’s found there’s life after RonAt the weekends, Nick Offerm…

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Yours Unfaithfully review – three’s a crowd in 1930s polyamory play

Jermyn Street theatre, LondonLaughs give way to an interrogation of monogamy and jealousy as a couple open up their marriage in Miles Malleson’s playMiles Malleson’s 1933 drama is a reminder that polyamory existed long before it became a trendy term fo…

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Emma Doran review – wickedly funny tales of delinquency

Soho theatre, LondonReminiscing about her Irish upbringing, and later being wallflowered at children’s parties, Doran is an assured if reticent performer‘One of the hottest young stars in Irish comedy,” blares Emma Doran’s publicity. How nice to be so …

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