Misogyny is behind the criticism of the Saturday Night Live comedian’s relationship with Kate BeckinsaleQuiz time! Put your calculators away, please, I have a maths problem designed to test every inch of your natural intelligence. Ready? Here we go: Pe…
Continue ReadingHaving been repeatedly told that he looks like David Tomlinson, Miles Jupp now finds himself playing the mildly aristocratic character actorThere is something unnerving about feeling that someone else has lived through your career before you’ve even ha…
Continue ReadingCelebrated for her performances in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Hello, Dolly! Channing also earned an Oscar nomination for Thoroughly Modern MillieCarol Channing, the American actor who originated the roles of Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes an…
Continue ReadingTrailblazing comic, Oscar-nominated writer and acting sensation Elaine May is back on Broadway. Nathan Lane, Cybill Shepherd and others reveal what makes her tickThe very idea ought to be mind-boggling. Elaine May, now 86, is currently starring as a wo…
Continue ReadingWhen the comedian Mawaan Rizwan put his mother Shahnaz into his videos, they were an instant hit. And then Bollywood came calling…
In 2012, the comedian Mawaan Rizwan was making videos for YouTube and gaining modest success. One day, he found himself in need of a stooge for his latest sketch, so he roped in his mum, Shahnaz.
The resulting video, My Mum Hates Me, in which the two of them banter back and forth about all the ways in which they annoy each other, took off in a way he’d never experienced. “That got 115,078 views,” he says. “So we did loads more sketches. In one of them, she dressed up as a goth, in another she was a midwife.”
She had always been very strict and focused on our schoolwork, but when she acted in my videos, I saw her in a new light
Continue ReadingSuperstar standups, daring dance, Brexit cabaret and a Bon Jovi musical … Dive into our guide to some of the shows at the world’s biggest arts festival
Continue ReadingRhona Cameron, Rachel Fairburn and Shappi Khorsandi give their verdict on the film in which Peake plays an aspiring comic in a man’s world
Related: Funny Cow review – Maxine Peake blazes in the dark days of standup
Continue ReadingIt is Britain’s favourite type of humour, the go-to gag for everyone from Carry On stars to Bake Off hosts. But are fnarr fnarr jokes just another example of male sexual entitlement?
If you want a double entendre, I’ll give you one. They pop up all over the place: on risque chat shows hosted by Graham Norton and Alan Carr, on the Radio 1 mainstay Innuendo Bingo and on Mrs Brown’s Boys, the hit BBC sitcom saturated in smut that attracts seven million viewers.
You can’t watch an episode of The Great British Bake Off without having soggy bottoms, moist ladyfingers and manhandled dough balls shoved down your throat. Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins may have gone, taking with them such exclamations as “Time to reveal your cracks!”, but Noel Fielding has cheerfully filled their hole. “If there’s an opportunity for exposed bottoms, we should embrace it,” he said during his debut season. With 11 million viewers, he certainly enjoyed a big opening.
On a horse-riding holiday in Morocco, Mr Gimlet ‘paid £10 for the privilege of being tossed off by a frisky young Arab’
Continue ReadingOutrageously rude and shockingly funny, Amy Schumer has always made her audiences gasp. She talks to Sophie Heawood about falling in love, one-night stands and going nuts on stage
When I meet Amy Schumer, she has been married for exactly one month and is working on a joke about her husband’s penis. Something along the lines of, my husband is uncircumcised – for now. She had jotted it down on the Notes app on her iPhone, where she keeps a lot of ideas, but it duplicated the note five times “so now it looks like I really have plans to mutilate him,” she says.
She then admits that she actually first used that line about another man she used to date, “but you have to update it so it’s about the person you’re with now. And really, my husband is good, he can keep everything he has. At this point in my life, I’m cool with foreskin or not – God bless everyone and their penii,” she says, breezily, as if she might have exhausted herself by creating a persona who is supposed to care so much.
I think we should see more – I’m not letting them retouch me in the film
What the kids are just realising is that the adults are not actually in control
Continue ReadingAs Maxine Peake takes the mic to play a club comic in Funny Cow, here are five movies that capture the lacerating, soul-baring world of live comedy
There’s something so intimate, exposing and ruthless about their artform that standups make perfect symbols for the battle we all wage to assert ourselves against an unappreciative world. So most movies about standup focus on failures rather than successes – none more so than King of Comedy, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro’s less celebrated follow-up to Taxi Driver and Raging Bull.
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