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…
Continue ReadingThe 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.
Related: Jamali Maddix: ‘I saw Bill Hicks and thought, there’s someone like me’
Continue ReadingThe 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.
Related: Susan Calman webchat – your questions answered on zombies, depression and Clare Balding
Continue ReadingSSE 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.
Continue ReadingCity 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.
Related: Danny Baker: ‘People assume I must be hiding some dark secret’
Continue ReadingEvery 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.
Related: More women on comedy panel shows? Sure – if you’re posh or pretty | Fern Brady
Having a fanny isn’t a barrier to being funny
Related: Study of UK comedy panel shows finds just one all-female episode
Continue ReadingThe outspoken comic talks about directing a ‘science comedy’ on the female brain, overcoming her battle with co-dependency and the cult of celebrity grief
At only 34, Whitney Cummings has packed an enormous amount of success – and a few notable failures – into her career. Named one of Variety’s “Comics to Watch” a decade ago, she went on to become a regular at Chelsea Lately and at the Comedy Central roasts. In 2011, she exploded – her sitcom Whitney premiered on NBC to withering reviews, only lasting two seasons; a short-lived talkshow would follow. At the same time, she was creating and executive-producing CBS’s 2 Broke Girls, a bona fide hit now in its sixth season.
Related: Comedy in 2017: Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle and the French Seinfeld
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Continue ReadingThe singer who stunned Pharrell, the writer to rival Pynchon, the son of a stone carver making art out of his body … we choose 20 names to watch in stage, film, books, art, design, music and TV
Continue ReadingGold TV has polled the professionals about their favourite comedy. But even the funniest of the funny can’t easily be reduced to scenes and one-liners
Surveys of Britain’s favourite comedy – and indeed, Britain’s favourite anything – are 10 a penny; the more so in our click-bait era. The Radio Times ran one last August, which found Mrs Brown’s Boys to be the nation’s best-loved sitcom of the century so far. Now here comes another from the TV channel Gold, in which “comics reveal their favourite British TV comedy moments and characters” of all time. What’s new is that this is a poll of professional comedians, and so more insightful, we assume, than those vox-pop efforts elsewhere. And so it is, to the degree that the sophisticate’s bete noire Mrs Brown’s Boys doesn’t get a sniff of glory. But beyond that, not so much.
The headline winners here are firmly from the drawer marked “usual suspects”, as Fawlty Towers is named best sitcom, and Alan Partridge the favourite male comic character. “Don’t mention the war!” features in the top three best-loved scenes, a category that includes – look away now, Stewart Lee – Del Boy falling through the bar in Only Fools and Horses. The best one-liners in UK sitcom history are “Don’t tell him, Pike” from Dad’s Army and “A pint? Why that’s very nearly an armful!” from The Blood Donor episode of Hancock’s Half Hour. (Given how closely these results mirror conventional wisdom since the days of shillings and pence, we probably didn’t need professional comedians to tell us that.)
Continue ReadingHow better to make sense of this turbulent year than through the art and literature it has produced? Our critics choose the works that sum up the last 12 months
If there is one film that holds a political key to understanding 2016, it is Ghostbusters: that funny, good-natured, easygoing female remake of the 1980s original. The movie, and the way it was received and viciously attacked online, told us something vital about the hive mind of the US’s reactionary right. It starred Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones. Wiig and McCarthy were already well known; McKinnon was the upcoming SNL superstar who was later in the year to become famous for her Hillary Clinton impersonation – but it was the African-American comic Jones who became the particular object of unpleasant abuse, reminiscent of #gamergate vitriol, naturally with a racist slant, though everyone was attacked, and all for daring to remake and allegedly “spoil” the original with a gender switch.
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