Kings Place, LondonThe Stranger Things actor discusses her experiences on male-dominated sets, alongside hosts Susan Wokoma and Deborah Frances-White’s standup comedySince its first episode in 2015, The Guilty Feminist podcast has explored topics such …
Continue ReadingMenier Chocolate Factory, LondonThe misadventures of a hapless hero led astray by his false friend are funny but don’t quite fill three dimensionsThere was a setback last month for this play inspired by a hit podcast when co-writer and performer Harry …
Continue ReadingAvailable onlineThe age of peak podcast meets its match in John-Luke Roberts and his procession of hilariously titled imaginary showsIn 2018, John-Luke Roberts’s Edinburgh show consisted entirely of names of hitherto unheard-of Spice Girls. He’s up to …
Continue ReadingPodcast The comic actor’s exuberant 10-part history unpicks the nuts-and-bolts of what makes sketches funny, from overlooked past acts to SNL, and British favourites including the Two Ronnies“The sexy dangerous first cousin of standup,” Keegan-Michael …
Continue ReadingThe comedian’s new podcast is bursting with enthusiasm for poems. If standup forces him to be funny, here he forces himself to be true‘Phwooar – Ginsy Ginsy Ginsy, I love you so much!” You won’t find that in FR Leavis. The “Ginsy” in question is beat p…
Continue ReadingFrom Iain Stirling’s Fifa banter to Jayde Adams live from her lounge, comedians isolated by the lockdown are reaching audiences onlineHottest front-room seats: theatre and dance to watchThe best arts and entertainment during isolationFor Scottish comed…
Continue ReadingIs the fringe ready for the brash standup who used to get paid in nachos and chicken wings? We meet one half of 2 Dope Queens as she fills her shoes with sweatWhat does Phoebe Robinson want to see when she arrives at the Edinburgh fringe? “Just tons of…
Continue ReadingAfter her standup success and podcast about death, the comic’s next step was obvious: starring in a cancer-ward romcom
It wasn’t, I assume, the toughest decision in the history of casting. Who you gonna call, Finborough theatre, to star in your new play about a comedian and improviser grieving her dead sister and tending to her dying mum? A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Gynecologic Oncology Unit at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center of New York City (yup, that’s the title) could have been written for Cariad Lloyd: comic, improviser and creator of Griefcast, the award-winning podcast about death. Talk about typecasting. Getting to grips with the role of Karla was hard, says Lloyd, “because I had to keep reminding myself, OK, this is where she’s not me.”
In fact, the play is a 2016 off-Broadway success, whose writer, Halley Feiffer, is now working on a new Jim Carrey sitcom. Its maiden UK production coaxed Lloyd back to theatre after years in comedy, improv and, latterly, parenting. “I’d wanted to do a play again for ages,” she tells me over tea on the afternoon of Funny Thing’s opening night. “But initially, because of the baby” – her daughter is 22 months old – “I wanted to say no. Then I read the script and I was like, ‘Oh, it’s really funny. It was annoying, but the part was just really funny.”
A Funny Thing Happened… is at the Finborough theatre, London, until 27 October.
Continue ReadingThe Glow star and hit podcaster talks drugs, divorces and his ‘horrible’ feud with Jon Stewart
The night before I meet Marc Maron, I go to his standup show in London. These days Maron is best known for his hugely popular podcast, WTF with Marc Maron, which he started in 2009, and on which he has interviewed everyone from Barack Obama to Keith Richards and Chris Rock. He conducts most of the interviews from his garage in LA, and they are almost always revealing and always entertaining. In 2010, Robin Williams talked about his depression and addictions, four years before he killed himself. Obama talked about the racism and African American stereotypes that shaped his sense of self. WTF now gets 7m downloads a month.
But in the 90s, when I first discovered him, Maron was not known for his empathetic dialogues; rather, he was seen as an aggressive monologuer. Back then, he was a struggling standup, with a style that was often described as angry and arrogant – or, as his friend Louis CK once put it, “a huge amount of insecurity and craziness”. He was known as a comedian’s comedian, which is a nice way of saying the industry liked him, but audiences didn’t.
Some of my behaviour was not great. It was emotionally abusive
The food stuff is my deepest issue, more than the drugs. I guess it’s about self-loathing and control
Continue ReadingPodcasting is a major channel for comedians, many of the medium’s biggest stars are comedians. It makes sense, because who… MORE
Podcasting is coming into its own and the comedians that helped build it are poised to reap the rewards appeared first on The Laugh Button.
