Tag: Festivals

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.

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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”.

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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

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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.

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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 reading…