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John-Luke Roberts review – Spice up your life with the nonsense manifesto

August 21, 2018TheGuardian

Assembly George Square, Edinburgh
A parade of daft characters and killer gags illustrate Roberts’ credo that absurdism reflects the chaos of being alive

Left-field standup John-Luke Roberts has always been appreciated as an innovator, coining new comedies on the margins while less interesting acts grabbed the plaudits. But the sense has persisted that he is more fun on paper than in practice; that for all his well-worked experiments, he lacks a certain warmth or those elusive “funny bones”. That’s less likely to be said of his buzzy new offering, with its orthographically challenged title: All I Wanna Do Is [FX: GUNSHOTS] With a [FX: GUN RELOADING] and a [FX: CASH REGISTER] and Perform Some Comedy!

The show is entirely its own thing: a run-through of 24 hitherto unknown Spice Girls, while delivering big, out-of-nowhere gags that could easily appeal to a wide audience. It is framed as a defence of nonsense. Our host – sporting shorts, a headband and a moustache died blue, in case we didn’t know where he was coming from – thinks stories are “a fantastic way of being lied to” and that absurdism better reflects the chaos of being alive. The Spice Girls, with their neat categories (Scary, Posh and so on), were just another failed system to make the world explicable. Better to let the madness in, as Roberts does by introducing us to Facts About the Romans Spice, Twenty-Seven Babies Spice and Lady Bracknell Crossed With a Theramin Spice – a funny premise, funnily realised.

Camilla Cleese review – drily amusing jokes about dad

August 21, 2018TheGuardian

Assembly, George Square, Edinburgh
In a set called Produced by John Cleese, the Python’s daughter shares the bill with political standup Steve Hofstetter

Having eschewed nepotism in the past to little profit, Camilla Cleese claims: “It’s now time I shamelessly exploited my last name to see if I can make it work.” And so her new show – or at least, the bill she shares with fellow US comic Steve Hofstetter – is called Produced by John Cleese. It’s isn’t, in the theatrical sense; but Camilla is, in the offspring sense. Shameless, indeed – but the fringe is nothing if not a hustle, and it’s working for Cleese Jr, who has audiences queuing around her George Square block on the strength of her surname alone.

I’m not convinced the 34-year-old has exhausted all the other possibilities of succeeding on her own merits. She might – like thousands of other comics – have brought a full hour to Edinburgh rather than just 20-30 minutes, first in 2014 and again this year. But at least, now as then, they’re drily amusing minutes, as our host deploys for our amusement her gold-digging Californian cynic persona – albeit flecked with a vulnerability that’s presumably real. (Hofstetter later tells us that, on this particular day, Cleese was performing through illness.)

Steen Raskopoulos review – tears flow in emotionally raw comedy

August 20, 2018TheGuardian

Underbelly Cowgate, Edinburgh
The Aussie standup ditches blithe character-comedy for a brave show that is often more sad than funny

No one who’s seen the Aussie act Steen Raskopoulos would associate him with trauma-as-comedy. While Richard Gadd and Hannah Gadsby won awards for their soul-bearing shows about sexual violence, Raskopoulos just kept on supplying blithe character-comedy about mournful horses, bank robberies and interpretive dance. But his latest show, Stay, pulls back the curtain on what we thought we were getting from Raskopoulos: not multi-role solo comedy but ceaseless voices in an unhappy man’s head; not (as per his signature sketch) faux-sentimental scenes about abandoned kids, but cries for help.

The moment in Stay that first implies this is beautifully handled. But I’m not sure Raskopoulos’s sad story has quite completed – or ever will – its transformation into comedy. The latter stages are terribly raw; the 31-year-old ends the show in tears. There’s no seeming catharsis in the telling, or sense of why he’s telling this story now.

Mat Ewins review – hi-tech gags from multimedia noodler extraordinaire

August 19, 2018TheGuardian

Just the Tonic at the Mash House, Edinburgh
Artistry and geekery combine in a set that shows off Ewins’ clever video editing and pranksterish sense of fun

Brexit. #MeToo. Editing a newspaper on Mars. One of those isn’t a popular topic among fringe comics. Indeed, I can imagine only one comedian making a show about it. Step forward, Mat Ewins, 2017 comedy award nominee and multimedia noodler extraordinaire. Last year, he unleashed his fiendish programming and editing skills – and all-conquering sense of fun – on a spoof Indiana Jones epic. Now he ventures deeper into hi-tech tricksiness – but also reveals more of himself – in this tenuous foray into interstellar media.

It’s ceaselessly inventive and daft – and it’s “piffle” (Ewins’ word) too. How else to describe his videos of football matches with the ball removed, or his all-new Martian sport that involves catching cats with a magnetic moustache. The newspaper narrative is only ever a thread from which to hang these techie sketches, and even its denouement is constructed as a video game, in which the audience controls Ewins’ editor character in a high-stakes – and highly-ridiculous – job interview scenario.

Dylan Moran review – superb standup sets out to solve the problem of life

August 19, 2018TheGuardian

Stand Comedy Club, Edinburgh
In his new show Dr Cosmos, Moran ranges across religion, politics, cat personalities and TV ads for shampoo

Elsewhere on the fringe, twentysomething tyros will hurl their “hellzapoppin” comedy in your face, says Dylan Moran. But not here: “This is drive-time, people!” It’s not the first time the Irishman has played premature senescence for comic effect, but now there’s a new development. He’s stopped drinking, he tells us: “That’s why this show is a bit wonky.” Well, if this is wonky, I’d marvel to see Moran on point. Because Dr Cosmos – in its hour-long version before touring in expanded form – is top-drawer standup from this past master of the art form.

There’s no theme, save Moran’s bold promise to offer “all the answers” to the problem of life. With a crib sheet for assistance (he says teetotalism has affected his memory), he ranges across politics, religion, dinner parties and – he’s not always au courant – Findus crispy pancakes. It’s “not even jazz”, he says of the show’s modus operandi. “Jazz is too organised. It’s just -zz.” Certainly, the show derives some of its charge from its free-form nature. The impression, rightly or wrongly, is of a man plucking jokes and extemporised riffs from a head teeming with comedy. Few fringe shows come as well stuffed with sparkling material, or suggest that the act could probably keep operating at a high, if scattershot, level for hours.

Rosie Jones: ‘People feel awkward about disability so I always have jokes in my back pocket’

August 17, 2018TheGuardian

The Bridlington-born standup is at Edinburgh with her debut show. She talks about surprising audiences, her sitcom and how her cerebral palsy lets her push boundaries

How would you describe your sense of humour?

I’m very cheeky. Because of my disability, I know how to push things and I know where the line is. I can probably push that line further than a lot of able-bodied comics. I enjoy playing with what is comfortable, and trying to make people be more open and more willing to see past the disability.

Rosie Jones: ‘People feel awkward about disability so I always have jokes in my back pocket’

August 17, 2018TheGuardian

The Bridlington-born standup is at Edinburgh with her debut show. She talks about surprising audiences, her sitcom and how her cerebral palsy lets her push boundaries

How would you describe your sense of humour?

I’m very cheeky. Because of my disability, I know how to push things and I know where the line is. I can probably push that line further than a lot of able-bodied comics. I enjoy playing with what is comfortable, and trying to make people be more open and more willing to see past the disability.

The Pin review – one of Edinburgh’s most dazzling comedy shows

August 16, 2018TheGuardian

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
Terrific skits and inventive gags mean the laughs come thick and fast in a delightful new hour from the sketch duo

Cleverness comes as standard from sketch duo the Pin. In the past, they have never quite shaken the suspicion of smugness and a sense, perhaps, that we’re buying all that flamboyant invention at the expense of warmth. No such danger with their new show, Backstage, which is simultaneously one of the most dazzling comedy shows in Edinburgh and a complete hoot. It’s probably no coincidence that here, more pronounced than before, Alex Owen and Ben Ashenden embrace the straight man/funny man dichotomy they have hitherto resisted.

The conceit is that the Pin play second fiddle to another double act, Philip and Robin. After their support slot, Owen and Ashenden repair backstage to practise their sketches, snark about the audience and fantasise about taking over at the top of the bill. What follows is a giddy slice of Noises Off-style knockabout, overlaid with the Pin’s signature meta-comedy, as Owen, Ashenden, Philip and Robin chase one another on stage and off, identities get scrambled and a chair on the stage miraculously reappears – and vanishes from – behind the scenes.

Jayde Adams: The Divine Ms Jayde review – comedy in full diva mode

August 16, 2018TheGuardian

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
The standup’s compelling personality and powerful voice add up to emphatic entertainment in this musical show

The audience are on their feet by the end of The Divine Ms Jayde, which feels less like spontaneous reaction than part of the show’s choreography. That’s not to detract from the potency of Jayde Adams’ third fringe outing, a musical comedy created and performed with the Jerry Springer: The Opera maestro Richard Thomas. But it’s also one of those shows – and Adams has one of those personae – designed with bums-from-seats vertical takeoff in mind. In comedic terms, it’s so-so. But Thomas’s music, Adams’ powerful voice and her spotlight-compelling personality still add up to emphatic entertainment.

You could see it coming after 2017’s Jayded, which laid the ghosts of her low self-esteem to rest, but this year Adams goes full diva. She is wheeled on stage under a flowery bower. She splays herself louchely across a grand piano. She emotes like a trouper – albeit for laughs – in a number demonstrating how to tearjerk on stage. (It’s all in the wrists, surprisingly.) Elsewhere, several songs (Whatever Happened to Baby Jayde?; Things I Wish I’d Known When I Was Younger) send up musical-theatre soul-searching without discarding sentimentality.

Camilla Cleese on her dad John: ‘He’s not my favourite Python!’

August 15, 2018TheGuardian

The comedian is doing a show about her father in Edinburgh. She talks about the sexist LA standup scene, her reconciliation with her dad – and doing jokes about his ex-wives

With just a hint of a smile, Camilla Cleese admits that the name of her Edinburgh fringe show is “the ultimate, shameless nepotism”. It’s called Produced by John Cleese, even though it isn’t produced by him at all. But she is. “I don’t think he would put money into something as un-lucrative as this,” says the daughter of the comedy legend, “unless it was a marriage”.

Camilla barely mentioned the connection in her first Edinburgh show, back in 2014, except for some jokes at the expense of her father’s many – and often expensive – marriages. But this time around, more confident and more experienced, she’s embracing her heritage. “I want to talk a little bit about being his daughter but, because I’m not doing a full hour, I don’t really have the time to delve into all the different aspects. So it will be a combination of that and some of my standup. For people who are familiar with him and his work, it’s clear where my influences come from. I can blame anything offensive on him.”

If I misbehaved, he’d act like a gorilla, going on all fours. I’d be so embarrassed, I’d immediately shut up

If you’re asked to go on the road with a male headliner, there can be an assumption something is going to happen

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