From Sara Pascoe’s new standup to a strange evening with Martin Creed, via acrobats, Samuel Beckett and a wild girl from Borneo, here are the sights so far
All photographs by Murdo MacLeod
Continue ReadingHe was one of the first openly gay men in metal. Now, after losing everything in a house fire, Faith No More’s Roddy Bottum is bankrolling an opera featuring crystal-meth arias and interspecies duets
In a top-floor flat overlooking Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh, Roddy Bottum is talking me through his fringe show Sasquatch: The Opera. Bottum is the keyboard player in Faith No More, whose twisted take on hard rock propelled them to global success in the 90s, and he’s at the festival with a cast of opera singers and experimenters from New York’s avant garde performance art scene. Though it’s a few days until curtain-up, they want to give me a preview. In true fringe style they perform four scenes right here in the living room, to music played on his laptop.
Related: Edinburgh festival 2017: 10 shows to see
Did Axl talk to me about being gay? Not so much
Continue ReadingHe’s not a TV favourite, but the actor and comedian has built one of the most diverse audiences of any current standup, partly through the subversive use of social media. Now he’s written his most personal show yet – and is booked to play Wembley
We are surveying, from the terrace, Paul Chowdhry’s garden, which is quite large (for London) and very neat. He has, he confesses, a man who comes to help him keep on top of it. That’s posh, I say. Having considered himself working-class all his life, Chowdhry is now considering whether he’s middle-class. He does have hummus in the kitchen, I point out. “And it’s organic,” he says, deadpan.
You may know Chowdhry from television, but possibly not. He doesn’t have a huge TV profile – he’s never done Mock the Week; he’s only done two editions of Live at the Apollo. Bookers rarely ask him on their panel shows (just one episode of 8 out of 10 Cats). He hosted the final series of Channel 4’s Stand Up for the Week, but his audience – one of the most diverse audiences of any current standup – has been largely built through word of mouth and social media, particularly the videos he makes and posts. He has done two sold-out tours, What’s Happening White People? in 2012, and 2015’s PC’s World, both of which were filmed for DVD. His new tour, which takes in Edinburgh, is about to start and he has had to add dates to cope with the demand. It includes two dates at Wembley Arena.
Continue ReadingThe actor and sketch show comic opens up about the things that make her laugh the most, from The Thick of It to German nipples
I love the Nazi sketch by Mitchell and Webb. Two Nazis worrying about the prevalence of skulls on their uniforms leading to the brilliantly plaintive question: “Hans, are we the baddies?”
Continue ReadingA puppet blockbuster, a Bigfoot opera and a Northern Soul dance marathon all feature in the lineup of the 70th Edinburgh festivalEdinburgh Playhouse Continue reading…
Continue ReadingSince first picking up the mic at 15, the standup has tap-danced, done Aerosmith karaoke and starred in her own TV show. So why does she want to disappear offstage?
Was there ever a greater discrepancy between talent and confidence? Rose Matafeo, at 25, is an award-winning standup, a TV star in her native New Zealand and made a striking Edinburgh fringe debut last summer. That show wasn’t perfect, but Matafeo’s force of personality – dominant, dorky-excitable – was a sight to behold. Here was a comedian whose power couldn’t be denied. Except by Matafeo herself, it turns out, whose stellar charisma on stage is matched by subterranean self-esteem off it.
This becomes clear over coffee as Matafeo girds herself for a return to Edinburgh with her new show, Sassy Best Friend. When I ask what it is about her comedy that is winning such acclaim, Matafeo squirms with discomfort. “That’s the most uncomfortable position to put someone like me in,” she says. “I’m not going to be forced to answer that.”
Related: Laugh a minute: Edinburgh festival’s 2017 comedy lineup
Continue ReadingSoho theatre, London
By his own standards, the 2015 Edinburgh Comedy award-winner plays it relatively straight in his new show – but there are satisfyingly daft moments
‘There are pockets of joy,” says Sam Simmons, peering out over his audience, but he also claims to see mainly confused faces. This is what the aggressively silly Aussie comic does: berates us for our under-appreciation, feigns his own failure. It’s a tactic, of course, to emphasise his weirdness, to ratchet up the absurdity and alienation of an already absurd act. And it hasn’t done Simmons any harm: he won the Edinburgh Comedy award two summers ago, and is, if tonight’s mantra is to be believed, “doing really well overseas”. (He’s now based in LA.)
It’s a risky tactic, though – in that, if you tell an audience often enough that they are not enjoying themselves, they might start to believe it. That was partly my experience at this performance of his new show A-K, when Simmons’s compulsive commentary on how his jokes were being received overshadowed the jokes themselves. That left the show, which arrives at the Edinburgh festival next week, a bit disjointed. It doesn’t help that this is Simmons’s most loosely conceived offering: there are fewer props, gimmicks and convoluted set-pieces, and it more closely resembles standup than the carnivals of oddity he has served up in the past.
Continue ReadingThe angst-mining millennial standup on the things that make him laugh the most, from Frank Skinner to tight vests
Frank Skinner’s routine on jealousy changed how I viewed standup. It has everything. Rage, empathy, filth, overapplied logic, tragedy and an exceptional amount of jokes. And the pacing is perfect. It’s five minutes long and he spends four of it on his knees barely even engaging with the audience. It’s like they’re not even there. This is one man going through his crisis for his own sake, not ours, but thankfully we’ve snuck into the therapy session.
Continue ReadingThey are the most reviled form of joke, but puns turn out to be comedy dynamite
When I was 17 years old, my classmate Jill O’Doyle asked whether I’d seen Titanic yet. It was the beginning of third period, the movie had just opened and I had opinions about its star.
“Titanic?” I said, my lips curling into the fat-kid equivalent of a Billy Idol snarl. “You mean with Leonardo DiCraprio?” Jill looked about 1,000 detentions exhausted by this response but, to her credit, she ignored what I’d said. Our chat was over. As far as I can remember, this was my introduction to how puns generally go over out in the world.
‘Titanic?’ I said, my lips curling into a fat-kid Billy Idol snarl. ‘You mean with Leonardo DiCraprio?’
Continue ReadingComedian’s use of the P-word was designed to show how attitudes have changed – but standups pushing boundaries don’t have the right to be offensive
Daniel Kitson called me a Paki last week. Well, not literally: he stood up at his sold-out show at the Roundhouse in north London, where he’s in the middle of a three-week residency, and spray-gunned the word six, seven or more times in the space of what might have been 30 seconds, a minute at most, at a room of hundreds of people in which I was very possibly one of only two brown people, the other sitting next to me.
Now, as comedians are wont to obsessively tell you, context is everything. So let’s start again.
Related: Daniel Kitson: the Salinger of standup
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