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Gein’s Family Giftshop review – purist sketch group’s most memorable show yet

August 14, 2017TheGuardian

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
The trio play depressed, maladroit losers with absolutely straight faces, and give an object lesson in offbeat humour

Making a virtue out of necessity, I’d call it – except that there’s nothing virtuous about Gein’s Family Giftshop, a sketch group who’ve cornered the market in dark, offbeat humour. Usually a trio on stage (Gein number four, the standup Kiri Pritchard-McLean, directs), they’re down a permanent member this year, after James Meehan pulled out on the eve of the fringe. What others might consider an obstacle, Gein’s exploit as an opportunity for more bad-taste humour, as the last two standing, Ed Easton and Kath Hughes, send up their own isolation and kick bitchily downwards at the ringer they’ve brought in to deputise for their absent friend.

Alex Salmond … Unleashed review – Edinburgh show is all bark and no bite

August 13, 2017TheGuardian

Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh
The former first minister of Scotland and ex-MP promises a political kiss and tell, but while a convivial host, fails to deliver the goods

When the former first minister of Scotland and now ex-MP Alex Salmond announced this last-minute fringe run, it sold out faster than you can say “independence in Europe”. Perhaps punters were seduced by the promise of (as the title runs) “Alex Salmond … Unleashed”. He’s been promising to kiss and tell, hinting on the Today programme at a story involving – of all things – sado-masochism and Kirsty Wark. Sure enough, the show begins (after a rousing reception from the crowd) with Salmond theatrically removing his tie. He’s buttoned up no more, and we buckle up for juicy gossip from behind the scenes of Scottish and UK politics.

But that’s not what we get. Instead, Unleashed is an hour of music, clubbable chat with a special guest, and some reflections on Scotland’s historical ties to Europe. (Each show will have a different theme.) Today’s visitor, greeted with surprise by the crowd, is the “Brexit bulldog”, David Davis – to whom we have to be nice, Salmond instructs us, because they’re pals. If we hadn’t been told, we’d guess from the chummy conversation that follows. Two old guys, two upholstered leather armchairs: think gentleman’s club and you wouldn’t be wide of the mark.

Phoebe Walsh: ‘We’ve all spent five minutes looking for the right emoji’

August 12, 2017TheGuardian

She self-eviscerates in the style of tragic Instagram feeds and harvests jokes from unsent tweets. But comedian Phoebe Walsh’s twitchy social-media spin is revitalising singleton standup at Edinburgh this year

During her debut solo show, I’ll Have What She’s Having, comic Phoebe Walsh rattles off an onslaught of self-eviscerating one-liners in the style of a pointy-fingered club comic. She is the “sassy best-friend character in her own life story”. She is “Pocahontas on the streets, Grandmother Willow from Pocahontas between the sheets”. She is, quite simply, “Miss Selfridge”.

Much of Walsh’s set taps into the online trend for self-absorption and self-deprecation. It recalls popular social-media accounts that trade in the bleak realities of being a gross, lonely human on the internet, the antithesis of the humourless humble-bragging endemic. She channels the essence of So Sad Today, Expectation v Reality, Girl With No Job, The Fat Jewish and your vacant reflection in the black screen between Netflix episodes. Such is her zeitgeisty and somewhat unhinged take on the single-girl-in-the-big-city schtick, she is also probably not for everyone. “You’ll either relate to what she’s saying or feel glad that you don’t,” reads the show’s blurb.

It’s uncool to take about how much we are on our iPhones, but the internet is always the elephant in the room

Kiri Pritchard-McLean review – thorny issue tackled with sharp wit

August 11, 2017TheGuardian

Pleasance Courtyard
Voluntary work with vulnerable children is an unlikely subject for comedy but this show is packed with plenty of insights – and laughs

Even at a festival where comedians routinely tackle thorny subjects, the matter of Kiri Pritchard-McLean’s new show feels unlikely: Appropriate Adult is about her volunteer work with vulnerable children.

It chronicles her mentoring relationship with one 15-year-old girl, including reflections on her own maternal instinct and the millennial generation’s refusal to reproduce. Pritchard-McLean has form in tackling uncomfortable topics: her 2016 fringe debut addressed the vexed question of sexism in comedy. That show was good; this one’s better. Pritchard-McLean’s confidence and craft and has come on in bounds, and her new set is packed with laughs and not short of narrative incident.

Why I wrote a comedy show about incontinence | Elaine Miller

August 10, 2017TheGuardian

As a physiotherapist, I know a third of women don’t have reliable body control. I wanted to raise awareness of this taboo subject at Edinburgh festival

I’m a physiotherapist, and as a fresh-faced graduate, my ambition was to work in elite sports. I did it, too, thriving on team spirit, travel and free trainers.

Then I had three babies in four years, each blessed with a bigger head than the one before. A dramatic sneeze during a zumba class showed me (and everyone there) that my pelvic floor had been reduced to rubble. In that excruciating instant, I realised that what really mattered was not being able to jump a tiny bit farther, or run a bit faster than others, but, being able to jump and run without wet pants.

Edinburgh festival 2017: the shows we recommend

August 9, 2017August 23, 2017TheGuardian

Plan your viewing with our list of top shows, ordered by start time. This page will be updated throughout the festival Continue reading…

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.

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.

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