The Edinburgh festival 2017 is still going strong with unlikely film stars, black-history monologues and toddler comedy sidekicks – here’s a selection of the latest shows photographed by Murdo MacLeod
Continue ReadingAssembly George Square, Edinburgh
Comedy proves inadequate consolation for battling the patriarchy in the Tasmanian standup’s uncomfortable but indelible swansong
Hannah Gadsby’s extraordinary Nanette arrives in Edinburgh trailing plaudits from its Australian run. But it is, she announces, her swansong: “I’m quitting comedy. Done. Bored.” Gadsby has lost patience with the elisions and deceptions standup entails. “I’ve made my story into a joke,” she says, in a show that’s passionately concerned with challenging the (patriarchal, heteronormative) stories our culture tells itself. There are jokes in Nanette, too: some good ones, initially. But they dry up – and something more confrontational, an angry repudiation of the consolations of comedy, takes their place.
Continue ReadingThe star of Marvel’s blockbuster is the subject of his father’s comedy show at the Edinburgh fringe. They discuss the art of getting laughs, sending Spidey back to school and finding the old man a part in a webslinging sequel
There is no shortage of up-and-coming comedians with famous parents at this year’s Edinburgh fringe: Elliot Steel (son of Mark), Will Hislop (son of Ian) and Ruby Wax’s daughters, Maddy and Marina Bye, are all performing. At the Voodoo Rooms venue in the New Town, the situation is a little different. Standup Dominic Holland, who recently turned 50, is in Edinburgh with a free fringe show, 24 years after winning the best newcomer award at the festival. The subject of his new set? How his success has been surpassed by that of his 21-year-old son, Tom, star of Marvel’s latest blockbuster, Spider-Man: Homecoming.
“I genuinely don’t need to be here,” Dominic states in his show, Eclipsed, with reference to his son’s lucrative webslinging contract. He describes his own gig as “indoor busking” – it’s free to get in but he holds a bucket for punters’ donations on their way out. Tom is currently filming sci-fi thriller Chaos Walking, co-starring Daisy Ridley and based on Patrick Ness’s book trilogy, but has flown in from Canada to see the show with his family. It’s a surprise for his dad and, when I meet the two of them afterwards, they whip out a phone to play the video of Dominic’s ecstatic reaction when Tom turned up that morning.
Mum must have countless Spider-Man costumes that all of us boys have worn through the years
Related: Edinburgh festival 2017: the shows we recommend
Continue ReadingPleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
Pointing’s egocentric creep Cayden Hunter and his spoof acting masterclass is mesmerisingly ghastly and deliciously daft
Towards the end of last summer’s Edinburgh festival, tongues started wagging about Jon Pointing’s below-the-radar work-in-progress show in a graveyard shift on the free fringe. His spoof acting masterclass is back this year, developed to full length, transferred to the Pleasance Courtyard, and justifying the hype. Pointing masquerades as theatre guru Cayden Hunter – touchy-feely but thin-skinned, colossal of ego and microscopic in self-knowledge. He is the David Brent of the trust exercise and the improv game. Like Brent, Hunter at his best is so convincing you’d think his creator must be intimately familiar with his own inner prat. Or that, forced into contact with prats, he’s studied them (and his revenge on them) in minute detail.
In love with himself and patronising his audience, Hunter channels more bullshit than the sluice gates at a dairy farm. “There’s no maps for the kind of roads we’re travelling down,” he purrs. He is, in short, a creep – and yet (to Pointing’s credit) the text isn’t that improbable. Tweak the caricature down a notch, and this acting class – with its talk of risk and danger, its fetishising of “the truth”, poorly defined – is but an ace away from credible reality.
Related: Edinburgh festival 2017: the shows we recommend
Continue ReadingTrygve Wakenshaw has brought his one-year-old son as a sidekick, Flo and Joan search for love and Giants present the old disintegrating duo routine
For as long as there’s been comedy, there’s been the double act. Big one, small one; straight one, funny one; know-all and dimwit: these dynamics are as old as performance itself and – even on the formally inventive fringe – they inexorably reassert themselves. There are double acts for all seasons at this year’s festival: one assembled to make provocative points about race (that’s Brendon Burns and Indigenous Australian comic Craig Quartermaine), one because the third member of a sketch troupe jumped ship just before the fringe (that’s Gein’s Family Giftshop).
Related: Edinburgh festival 2017: the shows we recommend
Continue ReadingLucy Porter caused a breakup. Romesh Ranganathan did a diabetes panel show. And Alexei Sayle survived a skinhead invasion. Comics relive their worst moments on stage
A guy in the crowd had been drunkenly obnoxious all evening so I got everyone to chant “out, out, out” until he got up to go. He gestured to his girlfriend to join him but – with my encouragement – she refused and told him he was dumped. He shuffled out and she got the biggest cheer of the night. Years later she emailed to thank me. She was now engaged to a nice man who wouldn’t dream of heckling.
• Lucy Porter is at Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
From infidelity to insomnia and taxidermy … the funniest gags we have heard so far from this year’s standup shows
Robert Garnham: Insomnia is awful. But on the plus side – only three more sleeps till Christmas.
Dan Antopolski: Centaurs shop at Topman. And Bottomhorse.
Continue ReadingThe Canadian comic may look like she needs ID to get into her own shows, but her Fringe show is her frankest (and funniest) yet
‘I love being gut-wrenchingly honest,” says elfin comic Mae Martin when we meet in an Edinburgh cafe. “It’s so satisfying.” Other standups booked on the same bill as her should consider themselves forewarned. “I find it hard not to say personal things when I’m compering. Like the other night, I was introducing a friend and I told the audience: ‘This guy’s great, we had a threesome once …’ He was, like: ‘What are you doing?’ The crowd heckled him so much. All they wanted to hear about was the threesome.” She gives the sort of bashful, butter-wouldn’t-melt smile that enables her to get away with anything on stage. “I really need to be careful.”
Now may not be the best time to start. The Toronto-born, London-based comedian, who is 30 but would surely need to produce ID to be allowed into one of her own shows, is at the fringe with Dope, her funniest and frankest set to date. It examines addiction in all its forms, from social media to relationships to drugs, and relies for its success on her ability to bring comic effervescence to a heavy subject.
Related: Sara Schaefer: the breakout comic on trashing Trump and bombing on stage
Continue ReadingSix of the best from Edinburgh including Mat Ewins’ barrage of one-liners, a German teacher placement at a secondary school and a transgender journey
Pleasance Courtyard
Building on the success of her 2016 show about sexism in comedy, the no-nonsense Welshwoman delivers a lean and effective set about a year spent volunteering with vulnerable kids. It doesn’t sound funny, but it really is, thanks to her brusque wit and a high quotient of thoughtful, self-lacerating jokes. BL
Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
The standup provides near-constant laughs in a startlingly honest, high-powered show that spares no one – least of all himself
Can things get any worse for John Robins? At Christmas, he was dumped by his partner of four years, Sara Pascoe. She’s now performing a hit Edinburgh show that’s candid to the point of cruelty about their breakup. I’d fear for the man’s wellbeing were his own show on the subject to be eclipsed by hers. Happy to report, then, that it’s every bit as good. Not only is Robins extremely forthright about his emotional wretchedness post-breakup, he’s also consistently, uproariously funny. The two moods don’t contradict, they complement – which is an impressive feat.
“My flatmate’s left,” is how he kickstarts this standup cri de cœur. The truth hurts, and Robins needs coping mechanisms: calling her “flatmate”, expressing his feelings in a chirpy cockney accent. The first half recounts his new life in “Grief Mansions”, staring, buying bad furniture (because he can) and itemising the trivial pros and crushing cons (“one-all!”) of no longer being Mr Pascoe. Recollecting that relationship’s petty frustrations, he paints a merciless picture of himself as a neurotic, socially maladroit manchild. “I would leave me too,” he announces, at the show’s emotional nadir.
Related: Sara Pascoe: LadsLadsLads review – breakup tales from a woman reborn
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