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The fing about Micky Flanagan: irresistible rise of a minted everyman

September 18, 2017TheGuardian

The UK’s most popular comic is taking his cockney shtick on tour but he’s more than a cheeky caricature – his democratic brand of humour is smart and generous

I’m not sure whether to review Micky Flanagan’s comedy or weigh it. The biggest-selling comedian of 2016 is doing 12 nights at the O2 Arena. He is the country’s most popular comic and, by some measures, its most popular entertainer full stop. At one point in tonight’s show, random cheering breaks out at the back of the O2 auditorium and Flanagan jokes that Michael McIntyre or Peter Kay must have set up a rival gig in the crowd. When you can joke, from a position of strength, that the best-loved comedians of this millennium are busking to pockets of your audience – well, you’re a long way from Billingsgate fish market, where the young Micky once plied the family trade.

Class identity, of course, is part of Flanagan’s gargantuan draw. Not because he’s an uncomplicatedly old-school, working-class comic, which isn’t – or hasn’t always been – the case. As his earlier shows documented, Flanagan is something of a class chameleon, an ex-window cleaner turned university graduate, an Eastender now resident in East Dulwich, as apt to be found dissecting his new-found middle class habits as peddling the traditional values with which he grew up.

Absurdist comedians Tim and Eric: ‘Our show is a trainwreck of a live experience’

September 8, 2017TheGuardian

The comedy duo recently celebrated the ten-year anniversary of their cult show and talk about finding the funny in the mundane and how they met

For almost two decades now, comedy duo Tim (Heidecker) and Eric (Wareheim) have honed their absurdist and often gross sketch comedy. After a summer of touring and the recent 10th anniversary special of The Awesome Show, they’ve become the kings of out-there alternative comedy, by way of mock infomercials, situational humor, and the occasional song-and-dance routine. The second season of Bedtime Stories, their mock-horror after-hours series on Adult Swim, returns this month to magnify the humdrum tropes of suburban American life, cementing the duo as two of comedy’s most amusing satirists.

A piano store is so grim. How many pianos do you sell everyday? Who comes in to buy a piano?

Absurdist comedians Tim and Eric: ‘Our show is a trainwreck of a live experience’

September 8, 2017TheGuardian

The comedy duo recently celebrated the ten-year anniversary of their cult show and talk about finding the funny in the mundane and how they met

For almost two decades now, comedy duo Tim (Heidecker) and Eric (Wareheim) have honed their absurdist and often gross sketch comedy. After a summer of touring and the recent 10th anniversary special of The Awesome Show, they’ve become the kings of out-there alternative comedy, by way of mock infomercials, situational humor, and the occasional song-and-dance routine. The second season of Bedtime Stories, their mock-horror after-hours series on Adult Swim, returns this month to magnify the humdrum tropes of suburban American life, cementing the duo as two of comedy’s most amusing satirists.

A piano store is so grim. How many pianos do you sell everyday? Who comes in to buy a piano?

Tears of clowns: who are the saddest of TV’s sad comedians?

August 25, 2017TheGuardian

Television shows built around standup comics have taken a turn for the despairing. Louis CK has a lot to answer for

“Are you havin’ a laugh?”

Not recently, no.

Sara Schaefer: the breakout comic on trashing Trump and bombing on stage

August 15, 2017TheGuardian

After writing gigs on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, the American standup is heading for the big time via a show at the Edinburgh festival fringe

Losing control of your bladder in a grocery store. Being bullied at school for using men’s deodorant. Getting posture problems as a result of walking with a constant stoop to hide your flat chest. These and other harrowingly embarrassing tales are the stock-in-trade of Sara Schaefer, the latest potential US comedy superstar to head to the Edinburgh festival fringe. In recent years, Trevor Noah and Michael Che both played the fringe as near-unknowns before getting their current jobs at The Daily Show and SNL respectively. Schaefer could well be set for similarly great things.

From Del Boy’s cap to Steve Martin’s arrow – what happened to the comedy trademark?

August 7, 2017TheGuardian

Comedians once embraced a signature quip or look, so why have such tropes fallen out of favour?

Imagine a museum devoted to the iconography of comedy. There would be glass cases containing Del Boy’s flat cap, Father Ted’s dog collar and a perfectly preserved set of fork handles. There’d be an animatronic mannequin of Basil Fawlty, performing his impression of the Führer on a permanent loop. And on the public address system, echoing around the exhibits, a collection of immortal catchphrases: “Suits you, sir … You stupid boy … I don’t BELIEVE it.”

Related: The IT Crowd – box set review

Can Daphne and The Pin save Radio 4 comedy?

July 14, 2017TheGuardian

One act offers Badults-style sketches, the other does mindbending meta-gags. Both bring new shows to a station that specialises in self-satisfied comedy

The Pin and Daphne were part of a wave of creative, self-reflexive new sketch comedy that peaked at the Edinburgh festival two or three years ago. Now, both acts have shows on BBC Radio 4. I was interested to hear how their respective shticks transferred to the airwaves, and whether they could resist the tone of self-satisfaction that often afflicts comedy on the nation’s most urbane station.

The Pin’s show is entering its third series, and claims fans ranging from Ben Stiller to David Walliams. Daphne Sounds Expensive – starring the trio George Fouracres, Phil Wang and Jason Forbes – is returning for its second run. I hadn’t listened to either outfit on the radio before, although I know both from the Edinburgh fringe. In neither case can Radio 4 be said to be striking out into bold new territory – both companies are graduates of UK comedy’s most privileged finishing school, the Cambridge Footlights.

Mrs Brown’s Boys live? They’ll need more than malaprops and mincing to thrill an entire arena

July 6, 2017TheGuardian

Good Mourning Mrs Brown, the cross-dressing hit’s live show, is so full of horseplay, guffaws and in-jokes, I started to feel like a gooseberry

One surefire way to elicit sympathy from your cultured friends: tell them you’re going to see Mrs Brown’s Boys at the O2 arena. Was there ever a more polarising show on British television than Brendan O’Carroll’s cross-dressing comedy? It has been the UK’s most popular sitcom by some considerable margin over the past five years, but it is despised by sophisticates, who see in it the revival of all the tired conventions and chauvinisms that alternative comedy, or modernity more generally, were thought to have seen off for good.

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).

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