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Natalie Palamides review – big, uneasy laughs in fearless Time’s Up comedy

August 8, 2018TheGuardian

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
Palamides’ goofy interactive comedy about a macho ‘douchebag’ has a confrontational sting in its tale

You could piece together Natalie Palamides’ remarkable new show, Nate, by splicing some of the great fringe comedies of the last half-decade. Adam Riches’ rowdy burlesques on alpha masculinity are in there, as is Zoë Coombs Marr’s cross-dressing satire on sexism, Dave. It’s hard not to recall Adrienne Truscott’s game-changing show about rape jokes, Asking for It. Then there’s Palamides’ own Laid, which won her the best newcomer title last year and whose eccentric, silly-but-suggestive atmosphere is recreated here.

It is a potent cocktail: a goofy interactive comedy about a macho “douchebag”, with a confrontational sting in its tale. Nate starts superbly, as Palamides – disguised under a lumberjack coat, biker boots, shaggy moustache and marker-pen chest hair – motorbikes on stage to a cock-rock soundtrack. She is chugging cans, toting fake phalluses and flaunting her 2D masculinity.

Can you do comedy about rape? Natalie Palamides thinks so

July 22, 2018TheGuardian

The LA comic, who won best newcomer at last year’s Edinburgh fringe, has tested her electric new material on American audiences. But how will Nate – her ‘douchebag’ male alter ego – go down in Britain?

We should know, after last year, to expect the unexpected from Natalie Palamides. Who could have foreseen that the buzziest comedy in 2017 would come from an unknown LA actor making performance art about fertility, parental anxiety and eggs? But so it proved. In a blizzard of yolk and shattered shells, her show Laid wowed Edinburgh and poached the Comedy award for best newcomer. So we should have been braced for more surprises. But this? A cross-dressing comedy show for the #MeToo era that workshops, with audience participation, the idea of consent?

The show is called Nate, after a male character the 28-year-old has played since college. “He does come off as a douchebag, as we say in America,” says Palamides, speaking by phone from Los Angeles, where she has been developing the show with her director, the cult clown and previous Edinburgh Comedy award champ Doctor Brown. “At first you think Nate’s a jerk,” she adds. “But people warm to him because he’s sweet – a sweet lovable idiot.”

Ricky Gervais’s transgender jokes show we’re all in a kind of transition

March 14, 2017TheGuardian

The comic has been accused of transphobia after riffing about Caitlyn Jenner in his standup show. So does giving him a favourable review endorse those gags?

Ricky Gervais sometimes gets people’s backs up and so, it transpires, do reviewerswho write about him. “B4 you write another @guardian review endorsing jokes about #trans people,” I was advised on Twitter after covering Gervais’s recent show, “please consider the impact.” Gervais dedicates a section of his show Humanity to jokes about (specifically) Caitlyn Jenner but also, by sly association, the idea of transgendering more widely. “If I say I’m a chimp, I am a chimp,” one riff begins, as Gervais makes merry with the culture of identity as self-assertion – and scores dependable laughs with rudimentary monkey business too.

Manwatching: a secret female playwright’s liberating look at sex

January 6, 2017TheGuardian

The author of a hit show about desire explains why she’s staying anonymous – and why her play is only performed by male comedians

You’ve written a hit play, it’s been programmed for a run at the Royal Court – and you can’t take a shred of credit for it? You’d forgive the anonymous writer of Manwatching for feeling some frustration – but there’s little in evidence. “I keep telling the friends who know it’s me [and who are sworn to secrecy] that everyone should do a piece anonymously once in their lives. It’s tremendously liberating.”

Of course the part of me that would like to boast is frustrated

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