Tag: Festivals

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
You seldom know exactly what’s happening in this set as our host prowls the room, eyeballs the audience and wreaks confusion

Is the comedy world big enough for another Hans Teeuwen? The influence of that great Dutch disturbist is unmissable in Jordan Brookes’ new show, Body of Work, which transferred from the Free Fringe to the Pleasance and has been nominated for the Edinburgh comedy award. Like Teeuwen, Brookes is here to wreak confusion and instability – not as a substitute for laughs but as an alternative route. You seldom know exactly what’s happening. You can’t take a thing he says seriously, or can you? The register – from sweet to unruly and all points in between – changes on a dime. It’s a precipitous experience, and Brookes’ boldness and talent ensures he’s never dwarfed by the comparison to the Amsterdam man.

Related: Edinburgh festival 2017: the shows we recommend

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Laughing Horse @ City Cafe, Edinburgh
In a likable and thoughtful set, the Canadian standup revisits her adolescence and explores the affinities between relationships and recreational drugs

You might think Mae Martin’s appearance on this week’s Edinburgh Comedy award shortlist crowns the emergence of an exciting new talent. Scratch the “new”: now 30, the Canadian has been doing this for more than 15 years. Her show Dope takes us back to the standup apprenticeship she served as a misfit adolescent in Toronto. The way she tells it, comedy was an entry drug to, er, drugs. Teenage Martin went on the stage, off the rails and into rehab. Half a lifetime on, she explores that period, and her own obsessive personality, in a likable and thoughtful set from a performer who’s made the overlap between personal revelation and social/anthropological commentary her own.

Related: Edinburgh festival 2017: the shows we recommend

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Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
In a cracking show, Branded, Willan has an easy rapport with the audience as she interrogates her identity as a northern, female, working-class comedian

Northern, female, working-class. When Sophie Willan made her comedy debut last year, the industry pounced on her – she tells us – because of who she was, rather than what she did. “I never expected my identity to be more sellable than my talent,” she says now, introducing a cracking sophomore hour, Branded, that strains against those and other pigeonholes. It’s complex, broadly comic and thoughtful, never stinting on Willan’s trademark blunt and gossipy good cheer.

To begin, she interrogates those three identifying terms. Northern? Shorthand for nostalgic ideas about whippets and salt-of-the-earth values, against which Willan interposes modern Manchester and its love of hummus. Female? Cue dating stories, including a bathetic account of why you shouldn’t go green at a “traffic light party”. Working-class? A label whose hip-again status Willan gleefully mocks, before complicating the picture of her own background – not just the abandoned daughter of a drug-addicted mother, but also a Bolton-to-Bristol exile teased by her friends for returning home posh.

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Laughing Horse @ Cabaret Voltaire, Edinburgh
The astute standup drills into the divided, dysfunctional state of our world in a combative hour of coruscating comedy

“I’m left, I’m liberal and I’m losing,” says Ahir Shah, but with this new show, Control, he’s not going down without a fight. It’s a piledriver hour about the rise of authoritarianism, and the eclipse of the liberal values many of us took for granted. It’s not uplifting: those looking for good cheer should look elsewhere. Shah finds plenty of laughs in the benighted state of the world, and his reaction to it – but alarm, not amusement, is the keynote. Shah is horrified, and angry, and he’s not soft-soaping that for easy laughs.

The opening stages are deceptive, as Shah warns against tarring Leave voters as racists. As his vegan-who-likes-Nando’s analogy proves, you can join bad teams for innocent reasons. But the tenor of the show contradicts this equable introduction. The deeper Shah drills into Trumpism and the nativist landscape, the more he finds racism at its root. “Take this country back” begs the question “from whom?” – and Shah thinks the answer’s obvious. Fashionable political ideas about “the common man” and the “victims of globalisation” are just code, he argues, for wanting a white monoculture.

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The British-Malaysian comic on why conversations about race in the UK have become absurd, his favourite standups and how to outdo a rival’s nipple tassels

You talk a lot in your show about having one foot in British society and one foot out of it.

I’ve always felt like an outsider. I was always the white guy in Malaysia [where he lived until 2006], and then the Chinese guy in the UK. I think that sort of thing is quite common in comedy, not quite belonging.

Related: Phil Wang: Impossibly wise or offensively stupid – Chinese people in US films

Related: Phil Wang on Patrice O’Neal – indefensible views, undeniably funny

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