Sharks, standups and 9ft women: Edinburgh festival 2018 – in pictures
As this year’s fringe wraps up, look back at some of the shows photographed by Murdo MacLeod in Edinburgh
Continue ReadingTag: Festivals
Larry Dean: Bampot review – cheeky, chatty, all-smiles comedy
Assembly Checkpoint, Edinburgh
Dean is a standup with the popular touch and an easy swing to his style. Just don’t go expecting anything high-concept
Wednesday was a day of ups and downs for standup Larry Dean. In the afternoon: a maiden nomination for the Edinburgh comedy award. Early evening: show derailed by a woman having an epileptic fit in the front row. Dean dealt with the incident as well as possible, but it disturbed his flow as the gig stopped, started and stopped again. At the end, I left with the impression of another solid and enjoyable set by the Glasgow man, but no advance on his previous work. On other days, he may make a stronger impact.
The show was intended, Dean tells us, to be a celebration of loved-up life with his Australian boyfriend. But that relationship ended just before the fringe, so – one hasty rewrite later – we get a set ranging across his childhood, family, sex life and recent breakup. Much feels familiar from previous shows: the blokey take on his homosexuality; his hoity-toity mum; jokes about his Catholicism. My heart didn’t exactly soar at the routine about masturbating in a public toilet while someone is pooing next door. Another, about fellating a slimmer with “excess skin”, is no more high-minded but comes with a choice word-picture (“I felt like one of those Victorian photographers …”) to recommend it.
Continue ReadingGlenn Moore review
Just the Tonic @ The Tron, Edinburgh
Supposedly the story of his attempt to go on a mission to Mars, Moore’s set is actually a string of high-quality jokes
Comedy is not just about jokes, as we comedy types like to whinge – usually when Dave’s joke of the fringe top 10 is released to widespread nonplusment. But sometimes, jokes are precisely what it’s about – the time you spend at Glenn Moore’s show being a perfect example. Moore’s set – now nominated for the Edinburgh comedy award – is the best showcase of pure joke-writing skill I’ve seen on the fringe. They keep coming at you, and back at you, throughout the show, which purports to relate why Moore has applied to go on the first civilian mission to Mars. If he ever gets there, the little green men won’t know what’s hit them.
It’s richer than a straightforward battery of one-liners would be because Moore has threaded them into a story; and because (disavowing a career-long commitment to frivolous fictions) he pretends that the story is true. That’s just a game, of course, a wrong-way-up way of celebrating the ludicrousness of Moore’s shtick, as he introduces his flatmate, a surgeon who operates after all-night drinking sprees, and his inamorata, with whom he has sex so wild that “afterwards, we exchanged insurance details”.
Continue ReadingFelicity Ward: Busting a Nut review – a jumble sale of jokes
Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
From gags about vintage frocks to her toilet roll-hoarding mother-in-law, Ward is endearing, if under-powered
Not every Edinburgh comedy set needs a theme, story or tear-jerking finale. But it helps when the material coheres; when something turns a series of unrelated routines into a show. Aussie comedian Felicity Ward has assembled such sets in the past, addressing everything from her mental health to irritable bowel syndrome in smart, swaggering standup. But this year’s show, Busting a Nut, has no binding agent, save Ward’s livewire personality. It’s just a 60-minute club set ranging around such subjects as inspirational quotes, having a big nose and recent holidays.
That absence of narrative and argument puts pressure on the jokes. And for me, they don’t quite plug the gap. To begin, our host is newly married and living with her husband’s parents. Mother-in-law is a “feeder”, she says, and a hoarder of toilet rolls. The wedding is recalled, with a pedicure set piece (big-hitting if cut from familiar comic cloth) and a routine about Ward’s quest for a “vintage” frock. There’s a nice conceit casting the wind on Fuerteventura as a predatory man and a choice one-liner about yoga.
Continue ReadingEdinburgh Comedy award shortlist includes Ahir Shah and Rose Matafeo
Felicity Ward, Alex Edelman, Glenn Moore, Larry Dean and Kieran Hodgson also among standups in the running for £10,000 main prize – but the list has some striking omissions
The shortlist has been announced for the 2018 Edinburgh Comedy award, and it’s the most traditional lineup the prize has seen for years. In what will be seen as a shortlist for standup purists, the Jewish American act Alex Edelman features with his show about gatecrashing a Nazi meeting, the terrific New Zealander Rose Matafeo gets her first (and overdue) nomination and, with the only show that’s not straight standup, Yorkshireman Kieran Hodgson is nominated for ’75, a storytelling show about the pre-history of Brexit.
Also included – and competing for a prize won last year by Hannah Gadsby’s Netflix phenomenon Nanette – are Ahir Shah (following up on his 2017 nod) with a set about visiting his deported Indian grandmother in the wake of the Windrush scandal, and the veteran Aussie comic Felicity Ward. Gags-man Glenn Moore makes a maiden appearance on the shortlist, and local hero Larry Dean, from Glasgow, is nominated for his breakup show Bampot after a Best Newcomer mention back in 2015.
Continue ReadingI saw a man die on stage. It was me | Brian Logan
He’s been derided by Daniel Kitson, shamed by Stewart Lee – and now our comedy critic has been depicted having his brains blown out by Sam Campbell. Just as well he can take a joke
I can see why you might think it’d be alarming. I’m in the audience at Sam Campbell’s nutty late-night comedy show (I would say minding my own business, but that’s not quite true) when Campbell conjures photographs of three people on his upstage screen. “These are my enemies,” he says. My companion pokes me in the ribs – one of them is me. Next thing I know, Campbell (who won the prestigious Barry award in Melbourne with this show) is pointing a gun at the three headshots. I hear the crack of a pistol, and the image of my face collapses in a burst of cartoon blood. I’ve just watched a comedian blow my brains out live on stage.
In other circumstances, this might be – as they say these days – “triggering” for me. We’re permitted, I think, to be sensitive to images of ourselves being shot in the head. But I’m a live-comedy critic, I’ve got a thick skin when it comes to offence – and it’s not a new experience for me to cower in the audience while a comedian gets laughs at my expense. I remember an Edinburgh fringe many years ago when friends kept coming up to me saying: “Have you heard what Daniel Kitson is saying about you on stage?” I hadn’t, I didn’t really want to, but I soon did. Friends, it turns out, just can’t keep incitements to sexual violence towards comedy reviewers to themselves.
What was surprising, in both Kitson and Campbell’s case, was that I’d never given either of them a bad review
Continue ReadingJohn-Luke Roberts review – Spice up your life with the nonsense manifesto
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.
Continue ReadingJohn-Luke Roberts review – Spice up your life with the nonsense manifesto
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.
Continue ReadingCamilla Cleese review – drily amusing jokes about dad
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.)
Continue ReadingMat Ewins review – hi-tech gags from multimedia noodler extraordinaire
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.
Continue Reading