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Joel Dommett review – I’m a Celebrity star’s goofy comedy gets big laughs

April 20, 2017TheGuardian

South Hill Park, Bracknell
Skype sex and confetti cannons are harnessed to full effect by a likable performer who breathes new life into a time-honoured persona

‘Who here saw me on I’m a Celebrity? Who’s seen my penis?” Joel Dommett’s fame is of a very modern variety, the 31-year-old having been propelled into the slightly-bigger-league of comedians by reality TV and an online sex tape. The latter is mined for laughs in this extended touring version of Dommett’s 2016 Edinburgh set – infectiously stoopid entertainment with big payoffs, loosely exploring lies, truth and our host’s accident-prone love life. When it cracks on (in the second half, mostly) it proves Dommett to be no mere gatecrasher in comedy’s upper firmament, but perfectly at home.

The show’s weaker moments come before the interval, and stem, I suspect, from the task of padding out 55 Edinburgh minutes into a tour-friendly two hours. There’s some fine material in act one, but it is attenuated by lots of filler, as Dommett compulsively comments on his own jokes, mannerisms and the audience’s every titter. With a persona built on exaggerating his immaturity and gormlessness, it’s a risky business to perform a first half so thinly stuffed with good jokes – the risk being that we start to think the pretty-boy air-headedness isn’t just an act.

Joel Dommett review – I’m a Celebrity star’s goofy comedy gets big laughs

April 20, 2017TheGuardian

South Hill Park, Bracknell
Skype sex and confetti cannons are harnessed to full effect by a likable performer who breathes new life into a time-honoured persona

‘Who here saw me on I’m a Celebrity? Who’s seen my penis?” Joel Dommett’s fame is of a very modern variety, the 31-year-old having been propelled into the slightly-bigger-league of comedians by reality TV and an online sex tape. The latter is mined for laughs in this extended touring version of Dommett’s 2016 Edinburgh set – infectiously stoopid entertainment with big payoffs, loosely exploring lies, truth and our host’s accident-prone love life. When it cracks on (in the second half, mostly) it proves Dommett to be no mere gatecrasher in comedy’s upper firmament, but perfectly at home.

The show’s weaker moments come before the interval, and stem, I suspect, from the task of padding out 55 Edinburgh minutes into a tour-friendly two hours. There’s some fine material in act one, but it is attenuated by lots of filler, as Dommett compulsively comments on his own jokes, mannerisms and the audience’s every titter. With a persona built on exaggerating his immaturity and gormlessness, it’s a risky business to perform a first half so thinly stuffed with good jokes – the risk being that we start to think the pretty-boy air-headedness isn’t just an act.

Why I love… Dave Chappelle

April 15, 2017TheGuardian

I will never not laugh at his bit on chicken and racism

Back when easy streaming was a twinkle in some young executive’s eye, some TV was just… unavailable. If you were desperate to watch that US TV show, you could try the dodgy VHS guy down the market (ahem). So for a long time, I just heard about US comedian Dave Chappelle’s legendary show. When I finally got to watch, on a grainy DVD copy, I laughed so hard I cried.

Dave Chappelle, 43, moved to New York as a teen and was soon on stage at the world famous Apollo theatre. By 19, he was cast as Ahchoo in the spoof Robin Hood: Men In Tights. The 90s were good to him (more film and TV work, and his first standup special) but it was the 2000s that cemented his legacy: he co-created Chappelle’s Show in 2003, influencing a new generation of TV comedians in the process. The sketches and characters are iconic now (professional hater Silky Johnson and Chappelle as Prince are my favourites) and still relevant. His standup style is warmly sly and anecdotal: he’s your best friend but, like, 2,000 times funnier. I will never not laugh at his bit on chicken and racism, or applaud his incredibly nuanced “how old is 15, really?” bit on how black kids are perceived.

Danny Baker: ‘Mystery Science Theater 3000 nearly killed me’

April 14, 2017TheGuardian

From crisps to his co-host Danny Kelly, the long-serving radio personality reveals the things that make him laugh the most

Not exactly standup, but Monty Python at Drury Lane in 1974. I had to leave my seat to compose myself – I genuinely thought I might die.

Charlie Murphy, Chappelle’s Show star, dies aged 57

April 13, 2017TheGuardian

Brother of Eddie Murphy, who turned his encounters with Hollywood’s great and good into much-loved TV skits, has died

Charlie Murphy, the older brother of Eddie Murphy and a comic performer who turned his encounters with Rick James and Prince into standout sketches on Chappelle’s Show, has died at the age of 57.

In the show’s recurring segment Charlie Murphy’s True Hollywood Stories, Murphy would recount how his brother’s fame brought him into the orbit of the biggest stars. His versions of the experiences, played out by him, Chappelle and others, became enduring hits. In one sketch, Prince is at first mocked for his frilly shirt but then shows his slick moves on the basketball court. The music legend then serves everyone pancakes.

TJ & Dave review – wizards of improv conjure a comedy gem

April 12, 2017TheGuardian

Soho theatre, London
The Chicago pair show they are masters of their art with an off-the-cuff performance that is as poignant and sharply observed as any scripted show

Most writers and comics spend months – even years – honing scripts and refining gags. Chicago improvisers TJ Jagodowski and David Pasquesi make mincemeat of all that, plucking from thin air a one-act, multi-character play that is as funny, shrewdly observed and emotionally complex as many a slaved-over work. Right up there with the best of the Pajama Men and Improbable Theatre, they really are Zen masters of their art. I found their unshowy and beadily intelligent improv blissful to watch.

There are no frills, gimmicks or audience participation, just two middle-aged men building a story detail by extemporised detail. It begins with two office workers wondering at the late arrival of a third. One of them wears a new watch, bequeathed by his dead dad; the other, touched, spontaneously phones his own father. On these bare bones, fragments of a tale are fleshed out, in which an elderly couple fret about macaroni etiquette, a 7-Eleven attendant kvetches about his uncle Marcel, and a driver with blood spattered across the grill of his car “has no idea if it was a kid or a raccoon”.

Adam Kay review – ex-doctor dispenses mirth and strong medicine

April 11, 2017TheGuardian

Soho theatre, London
As well as diagnosing the entertaining eccentricities of patients, musical comic Kay issues an electrifying clarion call on behalf of NHS staff

Musical comic Adam Kay is a former doctor, of obstetrics and gynaecology – or “brats and twats” as he demurely puts it. His new show (from which a book has been commissioned) now addresses that career, partly for political reasons, as his blistering denouement makes clear. Those closing 10 minutes are tonally a thing apart from what precedes them: an emotionally naked disclosure of a career-ending incident, turned politically blunt clarion call for the staff of our beleaguered NHS. It doesn’t even pretend to be comedy, and makes a mockery of aesthetic judgment.

It’s stirring stuff; Jeremy Hunt should be fed this show on a drip. Even its main section – blackly comic extracts from Kay’s hospital diary, intercut with punning songs – counters the Tory claim that striking junior doctors are in it for the money. Here, we find our diarist missing Christmases, cancelling longed-for holidays and sacrificing relationships at the altar of medicine. He meets the eccentricities and idiocies of the British public with infinite patience and an infinitesimally raised eyebrow, and daily endures sights – geysers of patients’ blood; “the worst penis I had ever seen” – that would make lesser mortals (critics, say) quail.

Rich Hall: ‘Albert Brooks is one of the funniest comedians ever’

April 7, 2017TheGuardian

From squid pelts to neurotic standup, the misanthropic US comic, writer and musician reveals the things that make him laugh the most

Kevin Meaney, the recently departed Boston comedian, had the flat-out funniest 20 minutes of any comedian I’ve ever seen. It was basically an interior monologue delivered at a level of camp hysteria that literally had people in the room pounding the table with their fists and falling out of their chairs.

Tom Rosenthal: ‘I thought it would be cool to dye my hair into a Mongolian flag’

March 31, 2017TheGuardian

The standup and Friday Night Dinner star on the things that make him laugh the mostDave Chappelle on Sesame Street. Continue reading…

Henning Wehn review – Brit-baiting banter from Germany’s comedy ambassador

March 31, 2017TheGuardian

Leicester Square theatre, London
In his upbeat new show, Westphalia Is Not an Option, the playful standup tackles the EU referendum result

In the age of Brexit, is self-styled German comedy ambassador Henning Wehn an immigrant, a Londoner, or both? “I woke up on 24 June thinking, ‘Cor, blimey!’,” he says, setting the sly tone for a show – Westphalia Is Not an Option – that is determined to disrupt simplistic definitions of what an immigrant is and isn’t.

Wehn never considered himself one, he says, partly (cue supercilious smirk) because the word immigration implies a step up in the world. There are plenty of trademark mocking gags about Britain’s inferiority to his home country, including an old Wehn favourite about our non-German tendency to self-deprecation, and another marvelling at British buildings’ external plumbing.

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