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Ronny Chieng on International Student and testing the limits of The Daily Show

June 18, 2017TheGuardian

Playing himself might be the ‘easiest job in the world’, but the boyish-looking, sick burn-delivering comic has been reliving some excruciating memories

On stage and screen, the comedian Ronny Chieng is famously irritable. A senior correspondent on America’s beloved news satire The Daily Show, and titular star of ABC’s Ronny Chieng: International Student, the short, boyish-looking, sick burn-delivering comic has the querulous demeanour of a man prone to outrage and allergic to pleasantries.

The 31-year-old Malaysian has been like that since his first public (non-university) gig, at a tiny, dingy, subterranean Melbourne comedy room in 2009, performing a slightly rinkydink set in front of a crowd of approximately eight people. I know, because I was one of them.

Tonight at 11/10c, correspondent Ronny Chieng reports on the Fox News/Jesse Watters racist Chinatown segment. pic.twitter.com/FTq8HyJ0KD

Half the country hate you immediately, no matter what you say. You kind of realise every day is transient

Jenny Slate: ‘Ivanka Trump is a fake feminist and should be ashamed’

June 18, 2017TheGuardian

The US actor, standup and author on her new film, Gifted, rescuing her career after being fired from Saturday Night Live, inspirational women and the terrifying situation in the White House

Jenny Slate, 35, is an American comedian, actor and author. The middle of three sisters, with a ceramicist mother and poet father, she was raised in Milton, Massachusetts. While at Columbia University, Slate performed standup and improv. Moving to Los Angeles with then-husband, director Dean Fleischer-Camp (they’ve since amicably divorced), Slate joined Saturday Night Live in 2009, but accidentally swore in her first episode and was fired after one season. A stop-motion short animation made with Fleischer-Camp, Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, became a viral hit, leading to New York Times bestseller children’s books and plans for a feature-length movie.

With her distinctive voice, Slate featured in Zootopia and The Secret Life of Pets. On television, she appeared in Parks and Recreation, Married and Girls. Her performance in Gillian Robespierre’s Obvious Child, playing a comic navigating a pregnancy termination, won her awards including the Critics’ Choice award for best actress in a comedy. Slate stars in another Robespierre film, Landline, due out in the summer. In her latest film, Gifted, she plays a teacher who becomes involved with a man (Chris Evans) caring for his maths prodigy niece (Mckenna Grace).

Freak out! Reggie Watts on jamming with James Corden and tackling Trump with improv

June 7, 2017TheGuardian

The freestyle standup and bandleader on The Late Late Show is in London for a gig and has no idea what he’ll perform. Improv, he says, can free the mind – and maybe silliness can help save the world

Vocal artist, musician, beatboxer, actor, alt-comedian and now bandleader: it might be quicker to list the few things freaky American entertainer Reggie Watts doesn’t do. Best known now as the frontman of the house band on James Corden’s Late Late Show on CBS, Watts may be the best example of the theory (which I’ve just made up) that a person’s hair is the physical manifestation of their ideas escaping into the world. Watts twinkles at his audiences from behind a vast sashaying afro, and his imagination is just as unrestrained. “Creativity is such a natural part of who I am,” he tells me cheerfully, over salad in a London eatery. “I find it easy to tune into – as long as I’m listening and I can get out of my own way.”

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.

Help! We’re trapped in an American sitcom – exclusive Comic Relief video

March 16, 2017TheGuardian

In Flatshare, created by the comedy sketch trio Massive Dad for Comic Relief, two mates walk into the world of a US sitcom, complete with canned laughter. The sketch is part of the Comic Relief Originals series to mark Red Nose Day on 24 March. Flatsha…

Hate Thy Neighbor’s Jamali Maddix: a crude, cartoonish, straight-up standup

March 2, 2017TheGuardian

The comic who presented a TV series on the rise of the far right is back with a show that combines goofballery with cultural commentary

Did you see Hate Thy Neighbor on Viceland TV? A sizeable chunk of the audience at Jamali Maddix’s Soho theatre gig did. His documentary series about the rise of the far right seems to have catapulted the east Londoner to the frontline of young comics, and raised expectations, perhaps, that he’ll be a social commentator as well as a teller of jokes.

I saw Maddix’s maiden Edinburgh fringe show last August. He was promising and charismatic, but a bit raw, and some of his crowd interactions felt slightly misjudged. For his week-long Soho theatre run, however, he is on better form. He wasn’t polished then and he’s not polished now; that’s not his style. There’s a scruffy, shooting-the-breeze vibe, he often gets tongue-tied – and his appeal boils down as much to funny manner as to the acuity of any specific thing he’s saying. You get a lot for free when you look as distinctive as Maddix (bottle-bottom glasses, bushy beard, beanie hat and tattoos), speak like a cartoon (dismay and declamation forever propelling him to the top of his register) and gesticulate like a rapper.

Susan Calman review – Radio 4 favourite’s sparky set is far from cosy

February 20, 2017TheGuardian

The Stables, Milton Keynes
The standup reveals she’s taken up boxing on her Calman Before the Storm tour, and the show swipes energetically at a formidable array of targets

“No one says, ‘Hicks. Pryor. Calman’,” says Susan Calman, ruefully. “I’m not a dangerous comedian.” By her own admission, Calman is considered precisely the opposite, a “Radio 4 favourite”: chirpy, erudite, unlikely to alarm the livestock. Now 10 years a comic, her touring show locks horns with that reputation, and asks: is she the comedian audiences suppose her to be? If that sounds self-reflexive, I can only report that the navel gaze has done no harm to the comedy. This is a good-time standup set, more assertive and upbeat – and at ease with itself – than the shows I’ve seen her perform in the past.

The most recent was 2015’s Lady Like, in which Calman recounted a nervous breakdown she experienced as she adjusted to newfound celebrity. No such shadows cloud this set, which is conspicuous for its energy and ebullience. Itemising the expectations others have of her (left-wing, intellectual, lesbian) – endorsing some, scorning others – there’s a real attack to Calman’s comedy here. She’s taken up boxing, she tells us – and this feels like 90 minutes delivered by a contender always on the balls of her feet.

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.

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

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