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Angelos and Barry review – comedy pals’ barmy banter is a puerile delight

February 8, 2017TheGuardian

Soho theatre, London
The comic alter egos of Dan Renton Skinner and Alex Lowe claim to be the New Power Generation come to save us in a thin but skilfully written show

It’s a match made in – well, Ladbrokes, or round the back of Morrisons. Angelos Epithemiou (Dan Renton Skinner) is a gormless social misfit and erstwhile sidekick on Vic and Bob’s Shooting Stars. Barry from Watford is Alex Lowe’s wheezing octogenarian alter ego. Together, they present a popular podcast and now bring us the New Power Generation, their cult – sorry, spiritual movement – designed either to save the world or raise enough money to settle Barry’s debts to his pissed-off wife.

What follows can seem thinner than Angelos’s frayed Sainsbury’s bag, and frequently puerile. One routine trades on saying “tits” over and again at a picture of two songbirds; another on the amusingness of our hosts’ euphemisms (“plum bag”; “elderly nut-sack”, etc) for testicles. But at least the shambling and idiocy is entirely in character. And as the show develops and strains appear in this enfeebled duo’s relationship, subtler notes are played.

Still Game: Live 2 review – hilarity ahoy as the TV sitcom takes a sea cruise

February 5, 2017TheGuardian

SSE Hydro, Glasgow
Ford Kiernan and Greg Hemphill return to the stage with an even more ambitious live show – and just as many laughs

When does a sitcom get too big for its boots? It’s a worry that must have crossed the minds of Ford Kiernan and Greg Hemphill on returning to the hangar-like Hydro where, in 2014, Still Game played to 210,000 people in 21 nights.

There’s something surreal about seeing the TV escapades of Jack and Victor in a venue where bouncers guard the stage and the audience needs two giant screens just to see what’s happening. Undaunted, they’ve come back with a show of even greater ambition – and just as many laughs.

How Bridget Christie found the funny side of Brexit

February 3, 2017TheGuardian

After the EU referendum result, Bridget Christie ripped up her Edinburgh show and created a new one in just a few weeks. This is an anatomy of a standup set that has changed with the headlines

Creating a new hour of standup can be a lengthy process. Most comics spend months writing material and honing punchlines. For many, performing a run in Edinburgh is the final goal. For more established names, there’s life after the fringe, with possible London runs and national tours. So what happens when, after months of labouring over an idea, world events derail your plans? On 23 June, Britain voted to leave the EU. Suddenly that seemed far more important to Bridget Christie than the topic she was writing about, so she ripped up her show and started from scratch.

I meet Christie in a cafe near her home in Stoke Newington, north London, to talk through the creation of that new show – how every idea was formed, every punchline introduced, all in just a matter of weeks. She sits down, opens her rucksack and pulls out reams of A4 paper – drafts, handwritten set lists and pen-marked notes like handed-back school tests. So let’s start at the beginning.

Bridget Christie and Drake: top things to do in the UK this week

February 3, 2017TheGuardian

From the super-sharp standup latest set to the hip-hop megastar’s mammoth tour: your at-a-glance guide to the best in culture

Bridget Christie
The queen of feminist comedy continues her two-week run in London, with a new show that faces up to our EU exasperation, before heading out on tour.
At Leicester Square Theatre, WC2, to Saturday 11 February; touring to Thursday 22 June

Richard Herring: ‘Rick And Morty is the most brilliant TV show I’ve ever seen’

February 3, 2017TheGuardian

The comedian, writer and blogger on what makes him laugh the mostWatching Billy Connolly at the Hammersmith Apollo in the late 90s was a masterclass of long-form comedy. I also shared a hotel lift with him at the Montreal festival and he was funnier in…

Danny Baker live review – geezer with an endless appetite for gossip

February 2, 2017TheGuardian

City Varieties Music Hall, Leeds
The broadcaster’s first standup tour, Cradle to the Stage, is a lucky-dip of nostalgic childhood stories and showbiz anecdotes

You’ve read the autobiography. You’ve seen the sitcom. Now here’s the solo stage show of Danny Baker’s life – or at least, the bits of it he can squeeze into its two-hour duration. It’s billed as a “first ever standup tour” but really, it’s just one story after another from a man with an inexhaustible capacity for gossip and anecdotage. “There’s no script,” he says, then later: “I’m pretty good company, but that’s all this is.”

I’m not about to contradict him: Cradle to the Stage is less a show than a lucky dip into the grab-bag of Baker’s storied past. Having spurned his mate Jimmy Carr’s suggestion to preview it, he now jokes with his off-stage technician that he hasn’t rehearsed the show either. Act One ends abruptly at the behest of a downstage stopwatch, when – to Baker’s dismay – we’re only 15 years into his life story. From then on, he keeps alluding to all the great material he failed to cover in the first half.

Why aren’t female comedians funny? You asked Google – here’s the answer | Ayesha Hazarika

February 1, 2017TheGuardian

Every day millions of internet users ask Google life’s most difficult questions, big and small. Our writers answer some of the commonest queries

We live in a time of profound change and challenge and even though we think we know it all, there are still some big existential questions that plague mankind. And I do mean man.

Having a fanny isn’t a barrier to being funny

Seriously funny: the new comedy agents steering standups’ careers

January 31, 2017TheGuardian

An alternative style of artist management is helping talents such as James Acaster and Dane Baptiste take a long-game approach. Rule No 1? Be nice

Back in the 1990s, when club comics such as Frank Skinner, Jack Dee and Lee Evans were becoming household names thanks to the “comedy boom”, being a comedy agent was often a cutthroat business, fighting for the few opportunities on TV and radio. But with the rise of panel shows and streaming services, and the alternative scene moving more into the mainstream, a new school of agents are adopting fresh approaches to ensure their clients stand out. And forget bullishness – one of those tactics is to be nice.

“Being in competition with other agents is now a very dated concept,” says David Geli, co-director of comedy agency UTC Artist Management. “It needs to be collaborative. Everyone’s in this industry together and they’ve got to work together.” Geli, a former cameraman, set up the company with Polly McGirr, a TV producer. Bored of seeing the same old comedy faces on television, they started running an open mic gig at Greenwich’s Up the Creek club, as a means to see new acts. Neither, they tell me when we meet near their Peckham offices, had any desire to be a manager. But one act changed their minds.

All you need to do is write a brilliant show, be as funny as you can and turn up on time – we’ll do the rest

Shappi Khorsandi review – comic’s cheering vision of an inclusive England

January 26, 2017TheGuardian

Soho theatre, London
The Iranian-born comic, marking 40 years since her arrival in the UK, makes a compelling argument for the multifaceted nature of nationhood

The first 10 minutes of Shappi Khorsandi’s current show are the most intriguing – perhaps because they’re not really its first 10 minutes at all. Khorsandi debuted Oh My Country! From Morris Dancing to Morrissey on last year’s Edinburgh fringe, where it certainly wouldn’t have included a precis of her recent withdrawal from the longlist for the inaugural Jhalak book prize, exclusively for writers of colour. She begins tonight’s set by addressing that experience, in a raw section that contains a few good jokes (“Writer of colour? It makes me sound like a crayon”) and the potential for more, and more considered, commentary – in her next show, perhaps.

It’s the thorniness of that issue, and Khorsandi’s volatile feelings about it, that contrast with the rest of her set – a likable but comparatively uncontentious (to a London audience, at least) account of Khorsandi’s relationship with her Englishness. Having migrated here as an infant, the Iranian-born comic now considers herself English, and has little patience with anyone who disagrees. To those who say, “You weren’t born here,” she replies: “Neither was tea.” To those arguing for a genetic Englishness, she asserts that there’s really no such thing.

It’s Burns Night: what is it that makes Scottish comedians so funny?

January 25, 2017TheGuardian

As suppers are held for Robert Burns’ birthday, here’s a toast to the standups of Scotland whose attitudes and accents are perfectly suited to comedy

When I saw Scottish standup Scott Gibson last summer, his show felt as if it was extra funny purely because Gibson is Glaswegian. As if you get free comedy points – or even better, free laughs – for being from a certain part of the world. When I put this to Gibson himself, he hesitantly agreed. “I’m glad this is the accent I’ve got,” he said. “I love being from Glasgow. There’s a harshness. From a young age, we always slag each other [off]. I don’t know if we’re just quick on the retort. And storytelling’s always been in our blood. I certainly wouldn’t want to be from anywhere else.”

In the same interview, though, Gibson discussed Scottish comedians’ timidity – their sense of inferiority to “London, the establishment, whatever”; their sense that the Edinburgh fringe isn’t for them. Such is the Scots’ “cultural cringe”, much discussed north of the border, the Hyde of shame to the Dr Jekyll of pride that Gibson expressed in his city’s comic culture. It’s Burns Night tonight, which seemed like a good occasion to explore whether (in the year after Scottish comedians walked off with Edinburgh’s two major comedy awards for the first time) there is any such thing as an identifiable Scottish brand of comedy.

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