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Zoë Coombs Marr: Bossy Bottom review – a surprising (and silly) reinvention of standup

April 5, 2018TheGuardian

Award-winning comedian sheds her alter ego ‘Dave’ but is no less critical of the brash, male-dominated cult of standup

Before the premiere of her new show, Bossy Bottom, Australian comedian Zoë Coombs Marr tweeted that the last time she played the Melbourne comedy festival “I sold out and won the Barry”, but “this time I plan on doing an unremarkable season to undersold houses just to prove I still can”.

For the last six years, Coombs Marr has been performing as “Dave”: a caricature of a bad male comedian, patchy beard, sexist remarks and all.

Joe Lycett review – pansexual gadfly tickles the pompous

April 2, 2018TheGuardian

Royal and Derngate, Northampton
The naturally funny panel-show regular inhabits a small world, but he makes those narrow horizons teem with possibility and comic life

When Mark Thomas engages in activist comedy, he won’t be satisfied until laws are revoked or politicians’ heads roll. For Joe Lycett, it’s fine if he gets a few retweets or if the branch manager of the local bank gets the slight hump. A rage for change isn’t what powers panel show regular Lycett: you’d have a job finding a comic happier with himself and how things are. Pottering away in his home in a suburb of Birmingham, he craves no greater impact than to make people laugh, pester killjoys and lay bare how bad guys aren’t just bad, but usually humourless, too.

And he does it really well. If one marker of good comedy is making it seem effortless – not an artifice at all, just a naturally funny person chatting from the stage – then Lycett is among the best we’ve got. In his touring show, he has nothing urgent to communicate and few jokes, while his routines rarely seem to go anywhere. But he’ll have you chuckling near-constantly with perky tales of setting up in aspirational Kings Heath, pranks sprung on him by his schoolfriend Peter and by his various juvenile online tricks to peeve the slightly powerful or bring down scoundrels by a peg or two.

Joe Lycett review – pansexual gadfly tickles the pompous

April 2, 2018TheGuardian

Royal and Derngate, Northampton
The naturally funny panel-show regular inhabits a small world, but he makes those narrow horizons teem with possibility and comic life

When Mark Thomas engages in activist comedy, he won’t be satisfied until laws are revoked or politicians’ heads roll. For Joe Lycett, it’s fine if he gets a few retweets or if the branch manager of the local bank gets the slight hump. A rage for change isn’t what powers panel show regular Lycett: you’d have a job finding a comic happier with himself and how things are. Pottering away in his home in a suburb of Birmingham, he craves no greater impact than to make people laugh, pester killjoys and lay bare how bad guys aren’t just bad, but usually humourless, too.

And he does it really well. If one marker of good comedy is making it seem effortless – not an artifice at all, just a naturally funny person chatting from the stage – then Lycett is among the best we’ve got. In his touring show, he has nothing urgent to communicate and few jokes, while his routines rarely seem to go anywhere. But he’ll have you chuckling near-constantly with perky tales of setting up in aspirational Kings Heath, pranks sprung on him by his schoolfriend Peter and by his various juvenile online tricks to peeve the slightly powerful or bring down scoundrels by a peg or two.

Tez Ilyas review – cheeky chappie takes on British Muslim identity

April 1, 2018TheGuardian

Soho theatre, London
His new show Teztify is a jumble of familiar, subversive and incongruous humour, put it all pulls together for a powerful denouement

Tez Ilyas’s touring show Teztify begins with a montage of news stories about Islamophobia. We get clips of the Finsbury Park mosque attack, of US white supremacist Richard Spencer. It’s strong stuff, and establishes a tone of moral seriousness to which it’s hard to see cheeky chappie Ilyas living up. Then comes his opening routine, which flogs a smutty play on the word “popcorn” to within an inch of its life, and makes that earlier scene-setting seem more incongruous still.

But Ilyas pulls it round. Teztify, like his 2016 offering Made in Britain, is an accomplished standup set, whose jaunty lite-ent stylings only partially conceal a commitment to defending and celebrating British Muslims. It’s framed by a story of a visit to McDonald’s in Blackburn with our host’s niece and nephew. Ilyas has just relocated to Lancashire from melting-pot London, and is ill-prepared when a fellow customer turns on him with an aggressive, seemingly Islamophobic remark.

Michael McIntyre review – master of the mundane gets stuck in first gear

March 25, 2018TheGuardian

Nottingham Arena
McIntyre’s endearing observations and self-mockery remain, but there’s an inescapable sense of deja vu in a show that breaks no new ground

Michael McIntyre’s Big World Tour, it’s called – and the does-what-it-says-on-the-tin title is characteristic. McIntyre has been delivering exactly what people expect of him for well over a decade, and does so again tonight, with a show that deviates not one iota from the established formula. Fair enough: no one who likes what he does will be disappointed. But nor will they be surprised, as the king of primetime dispatches another 85 minutes of perky observations about family life, smartphones and bad traffic.

Increasingly it feels as if McIntyre’s most remarkable achievement is to keep finding new things to notice in domestic custom and everyday human (or should that be British?) behaviour. When he riffs here on taking a bath, or de-icing the windscreen, you think: surely he’s covered this before? But he retains the knack of making dull things effervesce. OK, the windscreen skit is more observations than jokes (he straw-polls the audience for favoured de-icing methods). But the hot-tub routine is a hit, drawing on McIntyre’s physical comedy skills as he “hover-paddles” above his scalding bath, testing the temperature with a delicate part of the male anatomy.

An interminable routine about traffic jams feels like being stuck in one

Lucy Porter: ‘You look bigger on the telly … and I’ve got a really small telly!’

March 23, 2018TheGuardian

The actor, writer and comedian on the things that make her laugh the most Continue reading…

Maria Bamford review – hard-won hilarity redefines quirky

March 23, 2018TheGuardian

Leicester Square theatre, London
The celebrated standup mines her self-doubt and general bafflement with life in a fine hour of extreme idiosyncrasy

The sense of event is palpable at Leicester Square theatre before this rare UK gig for the celebrated US standup Maria Bamford. Star of her own Netflix series Lady Dynamite, and trailing “world’s funniest” superlatives from her fellow comics, Bamford is making her London debut, surprisingly – a dozen years after her last Edinburgh fringe run. And she doesn’t disappoint: this is an hour of extreme idiosyncrasy, from a comic – and, one suspects, a human being – quite incapable of looking at the world in the same way as anyone else.

Bamford performs an artless ‘song’ about the pitched battle she and her husband stage between love and mutual irritation

Sara Schaefer review – US comic considers our fetish for the moral high-ground

March 21, 2018TheGuardian

Soho theatre, London
The standup critiques virtue-signalling modern culture in a thoughtful set argued with a light touch

‘Do you guys remember truth?” Sara Schaefer is over from America to discuss life in the eye of the post-truth, pre-apocalypse, Trumped-up maelstrom. She uses the past to illuminate the present, both publicly (pining for a time when public figures were still susceptible to shame) and privately. Schaefer was raised a zealous Christian, and her nostalgia for moral absolutes is not unrelated, she implies, to her flight from the religious certainties of her youth.

It’s a thoughtful show that becomes a lot more effective, comedy-wise, as it progresses. As Schaefer acknowledges, it starts slowly: “I’m just taking my time. I’m making it this uncomfortable on purpose.” Awkward pauses yawn between jokes; she kills the first big laugh, five minutes in, by letting it lapse into enveloping silence. Later, she apologises, citing jetlag and an anxiety attack the night before. Certainly, she’s a different performer by the halfway mark, when her critique of confrontational, virtue-signalling modern culture begins to coalesce.

Flight of the Conchords review – business time again, with irresistible new songs

March 17, 2018TheGuardian

Milton Keynes theatre
Brett McKenzie and Jemaine Clement return with a magisterial performance

“Some of you are probably thinking, ‘Gosh, they look a lot older,’” says Bret McKenzie, during one of Flight of the Conchords’ deliciously pregnant inter-song pauses. It is a remark met with a wall of knowing laughter: the screens either side of the stage succeed in underlining the star status of the duo, but also in highlighting the flecks of grey peppering their hair. Since they were last in the UK, the New Zealanders may indeed have become “dustier”, they may even have become rustier, but the pair are keen to reassure their Milton Keynes audience that they still know how to rock.

his confidence isn’t misplaced. The Conchords have lost neither their beguiling, monotonous demeanour nor their ability to perform laugh-out-loud, foot-tapping bangers while simultaneously deconstructing them. How easy it would have been to perform nothing but the hits – yet more than half of the 15 songs they play are comparatively new.

Jack Barry: ‘I recently dreamed that a telepathic baby summoned me to its house’

March 16, 2018TheGuardian

The standup and Chinese graduate on the things that make him laugh the most

I want to be nice and say one of my friends but that feels like a waste when this article is supposed to be about promoting me. So I’m going to say it’s me.

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