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‘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

Tickling sticks laid in tribute at Ken Dodd’s Liverpool home

March 12, 2018TheGuardian

Fans remember comedy legend who ‘broke the mould’ at house where he was born and died

A pile of flowers and feather dusters – or “tickling sticks” – has begun to grow outside the 18th-century house in Knotty Ash, Liverpool, where the comedian Ken Dodd was born and died.

Allan Grice, a 71-year-old former senior fire officer, made the three-hour journey from Wakefield in West Yorkshire to Dodd’s home to hand-deliver a card of condolence, after hearing of the comedian’s death on the radio early on Monday.

Tickling sticks laid in tribute at Ken Dodd’s Liverpool home

March 12, 2018TheGuardian

Fans remember comedy legend who ‘broke the mould’ at house where he was born and died

A pile of flowers and feather dusters – or “tickling sticks” – has begun to grow outside the 18th-century house in Knotty Ash, Liverpool, where the comedian Ken Dodd was born and died.

Allan Grice, a 71-year-old former senior fire officer, made the three-hour journey from Wakefield in West Yorkshire to Dodd’s home to hand-deliver a card of condolence, after hearing of the comedian’s death on the radio early on Monday.

Kings of loser comedy: how Flight of the Conchords took off

March 4, 2018TheGuardian

New Zealand’s ‘fourth most popular folk-parody act’ are on a sold-out arena tour. Is there a shrewdness behind the duo’s laidback shtick?

Few comedians ever play London’s O2 Arena and fewer still manage three nights in a row. Those who do tend to have some things in common: a relatable observational style, limited creative ambition and ruthless commercial savvy. None of which applies to Flight of the Conchords, perhaps the unlikeliest act ever to reach those airless heights of the comic stratosphere.

I saw Flight of the Conchords last week, warming up for their forthcoming arena tour with a run at the 140-seat Soho theatre. Watching their suite of kooky songs about medieval romance, piano-playing seagulls and spoon thieves, laughing at their low-key chat and minutely detailed interplay, the thought of their imminent transfer to arena stages was supremely incongruous. Not least to the Conchords themselves. “We’ll keep that in for the O2,” they’d remark, after this or that improvised quip or ramshackle moment of fun.

They’re so dry and so Kiwi. We’re at the bottom of the world, so constant self-deprecation is common in New Zealand

No matter how laidback they are, they always believed they’re good enough. They had their sights set on something big

Kings of loser comedy: how Flight of the Conchords took off

March 4, 2018TheGuardian

New Zealand’s ‘fourth most popular folk-parody act’ are on a sold-out arena tour. Is there a shrewdness behind the duo’s laidback shtick?

Few comedians ever play London’s O2 Arena and fewer still manage three nights in a row. Those who do tend to have some things in common: a relatable observational style, limited creative ambition and ruthless commercial savvy. None of which applies to Flight of the Conchords, perhaps the unlikeliest act ever to reach those airless heights of the comic stratosphere.

I saw Flight of the Conchords last week, warming up for their forthcoming arena tour with a run at the 140-seat Soho theatre. Watching their suite of kooky songs about medieval romance, piano-playing seagulls and spoon thieves, laughing at their low-key chat and minutely detailed interplay, the thought of their imminent transfer to arena stages was supremely incongruous. Not least to the Conchords themselves. “We’ll keep that in for the O2,” they’d remark, after this or that improvised quip or ramshackle moment of fun.

They’re so dry and so Kiwi. We’re at the bottom of the world, so constant self-deprecation is common in New Zealand

No matter how laidback they are, they always believed they’re good enough. They had their sights set on something big

Flight of the Conchords review – an intense hit of comic bliss

March 1, 2018TheGuardian

Soho theatre, London
Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement return with hilarious dialogue and new songs that easily scale the dizzy heights of their best work

We knew months ago that Flight of the Conchords were to tour UK arenas. We didn’t know until it was upon us that they’d start with a week’s run at London’s bijou Soho theatre. The run sold out without a shred of publicity, and the show – 90 minutes of blissfully funny musical comedy – reminded us why. They’re a little greyer, a little less deadpan, and with more starry CVs than when they last visited the UK eight years ago: Bret McKenzie won the 2012 songwriting Oscar and Jemaine Clement featured in Moana and The BFG. But tonight, the pair prove with plenty to spare that when it comes to silly and sophisticated comic songwriting, there’s still no one to touch them.

For long-term fans of the erstwhile “fourth most popular folk parody duo in New Zealand”, the evening supplies an intense hit of pleasure. And not just nostalgic pleasure: most of the songs are new, and easily scale the dizzy heights of their best work. Seagull – a hymn to freedom that comes complete with metatextual commentary – seems to be sending up “free as a bird” cliches, before a hilarious reversal. Piano ballad Father and Son finds dad and boy singing in counterpoint – and at crossed purposes – about a parental breakup. “You never know how love will end,” sings Jemaine’s sad dad, “Just don’t let her spend time with your handsomer friend.” Neat how that gauche coinage “handsomer” makes dad seem even more ridiculous. But the track is tender as well as daft, like their earlier Bus Driver’s Song, revived tonight. Or like the best work of Tim Minchin – their only rival as musical comic of the century so far – whose spirit is summoned when Bret takes to his piano.

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