Edinburgh festival – Page 62 – ComedyNews.Org :: Comedy News Organization

It’s the comedy economy, stupid! Elf Lyons on the true cost of standup

March 18, 2019TheGuardian

After a Franglais Swan Lake, the comic explains economics with sex dolls in ChiffChaff. She talks about loving horror, how guinea pigs helped her through illness and standing up for comedians Elf Lyons loves economics. Or rather, as she warbles to The …

Hands off my anecdote! The couple who mine their love-life for laughs

January 22, 2019TheGuardian

When you and your partner are both standups, jokes are a competitive business. But are there any limits? Sarah Keyworth and Catherine Bohart reveal all“When something funny happens to us,” says standup Sarah Keyworth, “it’s almost a race to see who can…

Hands off my anecdote! The couple who mine their love-life for laughs

January 22, 2019TheGuardian

When you and your partner are both standups, jokes are a competitive business. But are there any limits? Sarah Keyworth and Catherine Bohart reveal all“When something funny happens to us,” says standup Sarah Keyworth, “it’s almost a race to see who can…

‘I check her catsuit for wet patches!’ The funny, freaky world of comedy duos

November 20, 2018TheGuardian

Sharing bedrooms and backstage nerves, Lazy Susan and Norris & Parker reveal the intertwined lives of the double actFreya Parker: We started out as a trio called Lebensmüde. It was such a mistake to have a name no one can pronounce – or spell! Scha…

Race is still a touchy subject at the Edinburgh fringe

August 28, 2018TheGuardian

As the only brown person in the room at The Glang Show, I couldn’t shake a sense of otherness when a quip turned sour

I’m a few months into a new career as a standup comedian. I’ve had some lovely gigs, some horrific gigs and I have started to get paid for being funny. The path to comic glory is long and the only place to be in August is the Edinburgh fringe.

In the past, I have covered the festival as a theatre critic; this year I went purely to hustle for five- and 10-minute spots on live shows. On my penultimate night, I went to see The Glang Show at the Hive. It defies any sort of description, but if you picture Vic Reeves Big Night Out in a bouncy castle, on acid, you’ll be close. It is joyful, wonderful fun.

Joke’s over: why standups should refresh the tired ‘Edinburgh show’

August 28, 2018TheGuardian

The classic Edinburgh comedy show lasts an hour, with a strong narrative component and an inevitable ‘sad bit’. But this rigid template is stifling creativity

The late Sean Hughes had a reasonable claim to inventing what we now know as the “Edinburgh show”. Before 1990, wannabe comics went to the Edinburgh fringe and performed their best standup material. Hughes came along with something different: a funny monologue, set in his bedsit and containing a narrative to go with the gags. Comedy with a hint of theatre, in other words.

It worked: A One Night Stand not only won the Edinburgh comedy award (then called the Perrier), it got Hughes a Channel 4 series. And 28 years later, Hughes’s template for a 60-minute show still dominates the fringe.

So common is the ‘sad bit’ now that not only is it a cliche in comedy circles, it’s also become a cliche for standups to knowingly point it out

Olga Koch review – from Russia with love and oligarchs

August 27, 2018TheGuardian

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
In a spirited Edinburgh debut, the daughter of a former deputy PM of Russia tells her father’s fascinating story

Plenty of comics get good material from their parents’ behaviour, and plenty of comics talk politics. Seldom before have those species of comedy been cross-bred – but then not all comics have a story to tell as eye-opening as Olga Koch’s. She is the daughter of a provincial mayor in the USSR, briefly turned deputy PM of Boris Yeltsin’s Russia. Alfred Koch cooked up the “voucher privatisation” scheme that channelled Soviet state assets into the hands of the oligarchs. As Olga says, that’s a hell of dad fact for a teenage daughter to have in reserve when she needs to win a family argument.

Her debut Edinburgh show (she was shortlisted for best newcomer) tells her parents’ story in flashback from the time, four years ago, that her dad went alarmingly awol from his Moscow apartment. It’s part storytelling, part family album, and part Clive James on TV mockery of Russian advertising. I found those latter sections a little condescending. But given what her dad has suffered, and continues to suffer, at Russia’s hands, you can’t blame Koch – Russian-born, American-educated – for taking potshots in the other direction.

Sarah Keyworth: Dark Horse review – tomboy tales and top-notch jokes

August 27, 2018TheGuardian

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
The LGBTQ+ standup twists gender into new shapes in a fringe debut that feels like a great intro to a fresh comic personality

Should we be disowning words like “boys” and “girls” – or broadening what those words are allowed to mean? Sarah Keyworth is in an interesting position to discuss the question. She’s LGBTQ+, even if she seldom lingers beyond the first letter. As a solo-show debutante, nominated for b est newcomer at the Comedy awards, she’s part of generation pulling gender into new shapes. And her adolescence was blighted by bullying because she didn’t conform to stereotypes of what a girl should be.

Such is the stuff of Dark Horse – a maiden fringe hour that (as per convention) sets out Keyworth’s stall, but without a hint of navel-gazing. For that, we’ve got Roly to thank – he’s one of two well-heeled children she’s nannied for the last four years. Latterly, Roly emerges as the show’s subject and star, as Keyworth sees her mafia levels of infant confidence eroded by the pressure never to be “bossy”, far less a “slut”. Like Cora Bissett’s What Girls Are Made Of, Dark Horse is determined to let girls fearlessly be girls. Keyworth risks overarticulating the point, and there’s no need: her show could scarcely be better constructed to express it.

Edinburgh award champ Rose Matafeo’s Horndog is a comedy smash

August 25, 2018TheGuardian

The Kiwi standup thoroughly deserves her success with an uproarious, emotionally intimate and feminist show

With the triumph of Rose Matafeo in this year’s Edinburgh Comedy awards, a sub-par shortlist has been redeemed. Matafeo’s show Horndog is another cracking show from a born comedian, a high-energy, high-anxiety New Zealander whose party-comedy mixes emotional intimacy and uproarious good fun with a thread of unshowy feminism. For me, Horndog wasn’t quite as exhilarating at its 2017 predecessor, Sassy Best Friend. But I couldn’t be happier to see Matafeo’s victory. She becomes the fifth solo female standup and the first solo person of colour to win the main award. Her win will hopefully open out her excellent and accessible work to a wider audience.

It might even boost her self-confidence, too. Ironically, given her prodigious talent – honed since she started standup as a 15-year-old – I’ve never interviewed a comedian so reluctant to speak well of herself. There’s plenty of that self-mortification on display in Horndog, which chronicles Matafeo’s barely functioning love- and sex-life. From teenage crushes on Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos via her struggles to focus on masturbation to emotional near-collapse in the closing stages, the show is a hoot. It also features a routine about sleazy male behaviour in comedy, giving it membership of the large club of 2018 standup shows with a #MeToo dimension.