After a turn on stage as George III, the co-founder of the League is returning to horror to recreate Dracula for TV. What he finds ‘frightening and debilitating’ now, though, is leaving the EUMark Gatiss is recalling an early memory, rocking back and f…
Continue ReadingAfter her standup success and podcast about death, the comic’s next step was obvious: starring in a cancer-ward romcom
It wasn’t, I assume, the toughest decision in the history of casting. Who you gonna call, Finborough theatre, to star in your new play about a comedian and improviser grieving her dead sister and tending to her dying mum? A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Gynecologic Oncology Unit at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center of New York City (yup, that’s the title) could have been written for Cariad Lloyd: comic, improviser and creator of Griefcast, the award-winning podcast about death. Talk about typecasting. Getting to grips with the role of Karla was hard, says Lloyd, “because I had to keep reminding myself, OK, this is where she’s not me.”
In fact, the play is a 2016 off-Broadway success, whose writer, Halley Feiffer, is now working on a new Jim Carrey sitcom. Its maiden UK production coaxed Lloyd back to theatre after years in comedy, improv and, latterly, parenting. “I’d wanted to do a play again for ages,” she tells me over tea on the afternoon of Funny Thing’s opening night. “But initially, because of the baby” – her daughter is 22 months old – “I wanted to say no. Then I read the script and I was like, ‘Oh, it’s really funny. It was annoying, but the part was just really funny.”
A Funny Thing Happened… is at the Finborough theatre, London, until 27 October.
Continue ReadingSunderland Empire
Exhilarating new material joins favourite vintage sketches as Mark Gatiss, Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton bring their chilling creations to life again on tour
TV tie-in live tours aren’t always artistic successes. Sometimes, they’re more about nostalgia than comedy; sometimes it’s just a thousand people shouting out catchphrases. Neither applies in the case of this cracking League of Gentlemen stage outing, the group’s first for 12 years. Perhaps it’s because they clearly delineate old material, in the first half, and new, after the interval. Maybe it’s because (with Sherlock, Inside No 9, and all that) their careers beyond the League are flourishing; they’re doing this not because they need to, but because they want to. Mainly it’s because what’s on show is just brilliantly written and performed.
The first half couldn’t be simpler, as the performing trio – Mark Gatiss, Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton – zip through a selection of their vintage sketches. There’s the Go Johnny Go Go Go card game with its impossible rules, the dating agency run by a woman who despises her clients, and Pamela Doove’s feral audition for an orange juice commercial. The feel is old-school: the performers wear tuxedos and there are blackouts between sketches. But the performances throb with life. There’s real hatred in Charlie and Stella’s bickering over Trivial Pursuit, real resentment when Olly Plimsolls rails against the theatre industry – and when Gatiss’s “Mordant Mick” leads us on a Royston Vasey terror tour, the twist generates real chills.
Continue ReadingThe character comic switches roles like a regenerating Time Lord in her new Edinburgh show, Faces of Grace – from a wannable Love Island contestant to a cat-loving loner
It became clear to Emma Sidi this year that her interpretive dance about NHS waiting times would have to go. The 27-year-old comic, who has been seen in W1A and the BBC3 vlogging satire Pls Like, performed the sketch in January as part of a work-in-progress show in a studio space in London; Michael McIntyre was hogging the larger room next door.
Many comedians destined for Edinburgh each August put in a solid 10 or 11 months of workshopping beforehand. Sidi knows the drill, having taken two acclaimed sets to the fringe. Character Breakdown, in 2015, saw her play six different roles, including a feminism professor whose lecture, delivered entirely in Spanish, was prone to stray from the topic. At one point, she relates the tale of being interrupted by Dobby the House Elf during some “solo masturbación.” Sidi’s 2016 show, Telenovela, ended with the audience building giant foil wings for her to fly away.
Continue ReadingThe comedian on intimacy, teenage shoplifting and why she hates music
Pascoe, 37, appeared in the BBC series Twenty Twelve and WIA. In 2016, she wrote Animal: The Autobiography Of A Female Body and toured her Animal show. She is now writing her second book, Sex Power Money. From 16 September, she will tour the UK with her hit show LadsLadsLads, inspired by her breakup with fellow comedian John Robins.
What is your earliest memory?
Being in a pram and having a tantrum. I was being pushed and the trees above me were all blurry because of the tears in my eyes.
Related: Paul Whitehouse: ‘Sneezing is an affront to mankind’
Continue ReadingThe standup on his Netflix show, corduroy trousers, his dad’s backhanded compliments and the brilliance of female comics
Kettering-born James Acaster, 33, a drummer turned comic, has been nominated for the Edinburgh comedy award a record five consecutive times. His current Netflix mini-series, Repertoire, comprises four hour-long standup performances. He is appearing at the Latitude festival, Suffolk, on 14 July.
You’re the first British comic to shoot more than one Netflix special. What’s your series about?
It’s four standup shows themed around the justice system: one about being an undercover cop, one about jury service, one about committing a crime and one about witness protection. There’s also a hidden narrative running underneath that becomes apparent as they progress.
Corduroy hits the sweet spot between jeans and slacks. They’re a trouser middle man
Related: James Acaster: the Leonardo DiCaprio of standup
Continue ReadingThe whip-smart comic talks about mocking Piers Morgan and Donald Trump, mixing scorn with good cheer and moving from songs to satire
‘Determined cheerfulness is something I happen to do very well,” says Rachel Parris. If you’ve seen her live musical comedy shows, you won’t need telling: they present Parris as a wholesome West End Wendy forever on the verge of a nervous breakdown, performing songs that put a brave face on a chaotic life (The Gym Song) or – like her terrific X Factor spoof I’m Amazing – clothe sharp satire in faux-positivity.
No one who saw her excellent but unheralded stage shows ever doubted Parris’s talent, but it’s a big surprise that she’s now found her mainstream niche in political satire. Her whip-smart work on the BBC show The Mash Report has been adored – and deplored – by tens of millions, and she’s become one of the most prominent political comics in the UK and beyond.
Continue ReadingThe whip-smart comic talks about mocking Piers Morgan and Donald Trump, mixing scorn with good cheer and moving from songs to satire
‘Determined cheerfulness is something I happen to do very well,” says Rachel Parris. If you’ve seen her live musical comedy shows, you won’t need telling: they present Parris as a wholesome West End Wendy forever on the verge of a nervous breakdown, performing songs that put a brave face on a chaotic life (The Gym Song) or – like her terrific X Factor spoof I’m Amazing – clothe sharp satire in faux-positivity.
No one who saw her excellent but unheralded stage shows ever doubted Parris’s talent, but it’s a big surprise that she’s now found her mainstream niche in political satire. Her whip-smart work on the BBC show The Mash Report has been adored – and deplored – by tens of millions, and she’s become one of the most prominent political comics in the UK and beyond.
Continue ReadingUnderbelly, South Bank, London
The Londoner turned US Daily Show star shows herself more clown than commentator as she unpicks British race relations and Anglo-Nigerian manners
Last month, UK comedy audiences had a visit from Daily Show host Trevor Noah; this month, his Brexit correspondent and so-called “actual British person”, Gina Yashere, follows in his footsteps. Famously, Yashere had to quit Britain and its low glass ceiling for black comedians, to get a break. But this homecoming gig shows she has left in body only. She remains every inch the Londoner, and her set navigates the landscape of British race relations and Anglo-Nigerian manners as deftly as if she had never been away.
And she does so while largely avoiding the stereotypes in which previous routines have traded. This new show Funkindemup finds Yashere on her finest form – prowling the stage, alpha female, effortlessly in charge, at last enjoying the professional status she always felt she had earned. After some ice-breaking gags about rap music, she starts with a section on Windrush, slavery, and the “subtle, side-eyed racism” of the Brits – who are much cleverer than the Americans, says Yashere, at covering their racist tracks.
Related: The Daily Show’s Gina Yashere: ‘In England, I’d still be the token black face on Mock the Week’
Continue ReadingThe Glow star and hit podcaster talks drugs, divorces and his ‘horrible’ feud with Jon Stewart
The night before I meet Marc Maron, I go to his standup show in London. These days Maron is best known for his hugely popular podcast, WTF with Marc Maron, which he started in 2009, and on which he has interviewed everyone from Barack Obama to Keith Richards and Chris Rock. He conducts most of the interviews from his garage in LA, and they are almost always revealing and always entertaining. In 2010, Robin Williams talked about his depression and addictions, four years before he killed himself. Obama talked about the racism and African American stereotypes that shaped his sense of self. WTF now gets 7m downloads a month.
But in the 90s, when I first discovered him, Maron was not known for his empathetic dialogues; rather, he was seen as an aggressive monologuer. Back then, he was a struggling standup, with a style that was often described as angry and arrogant – or, as his friend Louis CK once put it, “a huge amount of insecurity and craziness”. He was known as a comedian’s comedian, which is a nice way of saying the industry liked him, but audiences didn’t.
Some of my behaviour was not great. It was emotionally abusive
The food stuff is my deepest issue, more than the drugs. I guess it’s about self-loathing and control
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