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Phil Wang: Kinabalu review – patriotism, privilege and lots of lube

August 21, 2017TheGuardian

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
Ethnicity and empire are tricky subjects, but not for someone living the immigrant dream and riffing on race with a childlike glee

‘I finally became a man this year,” says 27-year-old Phil Wang, citing a first purchase of lube as the threshold to adulthood. He’s certainly come of age as a comic: the smart and funny Kinabalu is his best set by a distance, showcasing a newfound ease and confidence as he ranges across childhood memories and heroic deaths, male feminism and broodiness. And race: the show’s headline-grabbing moments find the Malaysian-born son of English and Chinese parents shelving the lube to speak against the grain about patriotism, ethnicity and empire.

Comedian Phil Wang: ‘I enjoy a level of patriotism that only immigrants can have’

August 20, 2017TheGuardian

The British-Malaysian comic on why conversations about race in the UK have become absurd, his favourite standups and how to outdo a rival’s nipple tassels

You talk a lot in your show about having one foot in British society and one foot out of it.

I’ve always felt like an outsider. I was always the white guy in Malaysia [where he lived until 2006], and then the Chinese guy in the UK. I think that sort of thing is quite common in comedy, not quite belonging.

Spider-Man’s dad, Ruby Wax and Labour v Tory standup: Edinburgh festival 2017 – in pictures

August 19, 2017TheGuardian

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

Spider-Man’s dad, Ruby Wax and Labour v Tory standup: Edinburgh festival 2017 – in pictures

August 19, 2017TheGuardian

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

Hannah Gadsby review – electrifying farewell to standup

August 19, 2017TheGuardian

Assembly 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.

The superhero and the standup: Spider-Man Tom Holland and his dad Dominic

August 19, 2017TheGuardian

The 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

Ivo Graham: ‘Shaving my head was meant to give me an air of mystery and menace. It did not’

August 18, 2017TheGuardian

The up-and-coming standup whiz spills the beans about the things that make him laugh the most, from Lucky Jim to A Fish Called Wanda

Henry Paker at Edinburgh in 2010. Him, the surrealist maverick “unreading the Bible” in his hoodigan. Me, the spotty teenager coming to watch every day on my own.

Rob Kemp: The Elvis Dead review – a gory cult classic in the making

August 18, 2017TheGuardian

Heroes @ Monkey Barrel
The comedian’s inspired mashup of Evil Dead 2 and Elvis songs is much juicier than an ironic stunt

‘This was only ever supposed to amuse me and my mates,” says Rob Kemp – blood-drenched, chainsaw-wielding, shirt in shreds. You can picture the scene: a few pints down, someone notices “Elvis” contains the word “evil”, someone else jokes about splicing the King of Rock’n’roll with classic horror movie Evil Dead 2. These conversations are usually forgotten the next morning, not turned into Edinburgh fringe shows – far fewer are late-night hits that have comedy lovers queuing around the block.

Such is the fate of Kemp’s cult-in-the-making The Elvis Dead: a solo show hijacking Elvis’s back catalogue to narrate a demons v humans bloodbath in a Tennessee woodshed. Voted best show at Leicester’s comedy festival this spring, it’s now raising the roof of a sweaty backroom in Edinburgh. The Hilton Las Vegas it ain’t, but Kemp does a good job persuading you otherwise. He looks the part, he makes a decent fist of Elvis’s chocolatey croon (although, by week two of the fringe, the top notes are slipping from his reach), and he throws himself into the enterprise like a Kandarian demon with murder on its mind.

Jon Pointing review – a cringeworthy new comic monster is unleashed

August 17, 2017TheGuardian

Pleasance 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.

From a mime and his baby to singing sisters: Edinburgh’s comedy double acts

August 17, 2017TheGuardian

Trygve 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).

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