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James Acaster: ‘Brexiteers get amazingly angry about my tea joke’

July 1, 2018TheGuardian

The 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

The Mash Report’s Rachel Parris: ‘There was a lot of excitement and fury’

June 25, 2018TheGuardian

The 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.

The Mash Report’s Rachel Parris: ‘There was a lot of excitement and fury’

June 25, 2018TheGuardian

The 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.

Gina Yashere review – liberal anxieties defanged in homecoming triumph

June 24, 2018TheGuardian

Underbelly, 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.

Marc Maron: ‘I’m familiar with coke, anger, bullying, selfishness’

June 16, 2018TheGuardian

The 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

‘The world of comedy has changed’: how queer comics are making their mark in America

June 8, 2018TheGuardian

While mainstream visibility is still limited, LGBT comics are moving past cliches and homophobic roadblocks to take their place in the US comedy scene

Twenty-five years ago, Lea DeLaria became the first openly gay comic to appear on American television when she performed on The Arsenio Hall Show. “It’s the 1990s,” she announced with characteristic gusto. “It’s hip to be queer, and I’m a bi-i-i-i-ig dyke!” At a time when homophobia was rampant, forcing queer comics to traffic in innuendo when discussing their sexualities onstage, DeLaria and other out standups like Kate Clinton and Scott Thompson were radically candid and brazenly political, sometimes at their own expense. On Arsenio, where she was invited back twice more that year, DeLaria, who now plays Carrie “Big Boo” Black on Netflix’s Orange is the New Black, uttered the words dyke, fag and queer 47 times in four minutes. “I didn’t just open the closet door,” she recalls to the Guardian. “I fucking blew that door off with a blowtorch.”

Our models of success have always been smaller, more boutique comedians

Michelle Wolf: ‘It’s weird that Trump doesn’t have a sense of humour’

June 1, 2018TheGuardian

As host of the White House correspondents’ dinner, comic Michelle Wolf insulted Trump, his inner circle and the press. What happened next?

In the past 35 days, Michelle Wolf has hosted the annual White House correspondents’ dinner, scandalised Washington DC, outraged the president, run a 50-mile ultramarathon, launched her own Netflix show, and turned herself into a household name. Yet “the hardest thing I ever did in my life”, according to the comedian, was none of these, but “getting myself fired on purpose.”

Five years ago, she was working for a tech company, but knew she wanted to be a comedian. The plan was to get paid for as long as possible, while she worked on her act, until they sacked her. “I don’t like being lazy, but I was like: ‘Just do less and less work.’ I was writing jokes all day, just constantly writing jokes.” She nearly lost her nerve when she received a formal warning. “It was the worst feeling. I hate disappointing people. I almost gave up then and there.” But she stuck at the plan, and “eventually I got fired, which was great”. She celebrated with cocktails.

In standup, you tell a joke and people laugh or they don’t. On Twitter, they correct and complain

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner was a failure last year, but this year was an embarrassment to everyone associated with it. The filthy “comedian” totally bombed (couldn’t even deliver her lines-much like the Seth Meyers weak performance). Put Dinner to rest, or start over!

There’s this whole section of political comedy that’s just saying things we want to hear, rather than pushing our brains

We keep tuning in to everything outrageous that’s happening. We’re not watching the news but a show

People say they want honesty, but when they hear it they’re like, Oh, that was a cold slap of honesty

Get your hands off my double entendres! Is the smutty pun now under attack?

May 7, 2018TheGuardian

It is Britain’s favourite type of humour, the go-to gag for everyone from Carry On stars to Bake Off hosts. But are fnarr fnarr jokes just another example of male sexual entitlement?

If you want a double entendre, I’ll give you one. They pop up all over the place: on risque chat shows hosted by Graham Norton and Alan Carr, on the Radio 1 mainstay Innuendo Bingo and on Mrs Brown’s Boys, the hit BBC sitcom saturated in smut that attracts seven million viewers.

You can’t watch an episode of The Great British Bake Off without having soggy bottoms, moist ladyfingers and manhandled dough balls shoved down your throat. Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins may have gone, taking with them such exclamations as “Time to reveal your cracks!”, but Noel Fielding has cheerfully filled their hole. “If there’s an opportunity for exposed bottoms, we should embrace it,” he said during his debut season. With 11 million viewers, he certainly enjoyed a big opening.

On a horse-riding holiday in Morocco, Mr Gimlet ‘paid £10 for the privilege of being tossed off by a frisky young Arab’

Amy Schumer: ‘I’m not invincible. I need to slow down’

April 22, 2018TheGuardian

Outrageously rude and shockingly funny, Amy Schumer has always made her audiences gasp. She talks to Sophie Heawood about falling in love, one-night stands and going nuts on stage

When I meet Amy Schumer, she has been married for exactly one month and is working on a joke about her husband’s penis. Something along the lines of, my husband is uncircumcised – for now. She had jotted it down on the Notes app on her iPhone, where she keeps a lot of ideas, but it duplicated the note five times “so now it looks like I really have plans to mutilate him,” she says.

She then admits that she actually first used that line about another man she used to date, “but you have to update it so it’s about the person you’re with now. And really, my husband is good, he can keep everything he has. At this point in my life, I’m cool with foreskin or not – God bless everyone and their penii,” she says, breezily, as if she might have exhausted herself by creating a persona who is supposed to care so much.

I think we should see more – I’m not letting them retouch me in the film

What the kids are just realising is that the adults are not actually in control

Opera isn’t elitest. If I can learn to love it so can anybody | Chris Addison

March 21, 2018TheGuardian

Only a handful of people can sing in this visceral, thrilling way – but the feelings they evoke are universal

The best thing I’ve ever seen, in all my long and misspent years hanging around comedy gigs, wasn’t standup. It was opera. Back in the late 90s, I was standing at the bar in one of the spit-and-stale-beer clubs where I cut my teeth, watching the MC corral the usual drunken Friday-night punters. He lighted on a woman in her early 20s at a table down the front and asked “What do you do?” “I’m an opera student,” she replied to general raucous disbelief. “Oh, yeah?” twinkled the compere, smelling pretentious blood (and what MC wouldn’t? An opera singer and a student – that, friends, is a double whammy), “Give us a song, then.” So she did. The gleeful muttering and ironic applause stuttered out when she stood and sang : Puccini’s O mio babbino caro, which, like pretty much everyone else there, I knew at that point only either as the tune from A Room With a View or an ad we couldn’t quite place.

It was incredible: the clarity of her voice, the pureness, the emotion. Such an odd and striking thing to hear in a room where most of the time what comes from the mouths of the performers is soaked in self-conscious irony. And what a reaction! I’ve never seen a four-pints-down crowd focus like that; there was a stillness to the place – a wonder, really – as she sang. And when she finished, they went crazy. Standing screaming crazy. X Factor final audience the-guy-whose-gran-died-just-won crazy.

You’re listening to the most basic human tool of communication – the voice – used in an almost impossibly superhuman way

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