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Edinburgh award champ Rose Matafeo’s Horndog is a comedy smash

August 25, 2018TheGuardian

The Kiwi standup thoroughly deserves her success with an uproarious, emotionally intimate and feminist show

With the triumph of Rose Matafeo in this year’s Edinburgh Comedy awards, a sub-par shortlist has been redeemed. Matafeo’s show Horndog is another cracking show from a born comedian, a high-energy, high-anxiety New Zealander whose party-comedy mixes emotional intimacy and uproarious good fun with a thread of unshowy feminism. For me, Horndog wasn’t quite as exhilarating at its 2017 predecessor, Sassy Best Friend. But I couldn’t be happier to see Matafeo’s victory. She becomes the fifth solo female standup and the first solo person of colour to win the main award. Her win will hopefully open out her excellent and accessible work to a wider audience.

It might even boost her self-confidence, too. Ironically, given her prodigious talent – honed since she started standup as a 15-year-old – I’ve never interviewed a comedian so reluctant to speak well of herself. There’s plenty of that self-mortification on display in Horndog, which chronicles Matafeo’s barely functioning love- and sex-life. From teenage crushes on Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos via her struggles to focus on masturbation to emotional near-collapse in the closing stages, the show is a hoot. It also features a routine about sleazy male behaviour in comedy, giving it membership of the large club of 2018 standup shows with a #MeToo dimension.

Rose Matafeo wins Edinburgh best comedy show award

August 25, 2018TheGuardian

New Zealander’s show about sex and modern social mores scoops top comedy gong

New Zealander Rose Matafeo has won the coveted best comedy show award at the Edinburgh fringe festival.

Steve Coogan, one of Matafeo’s comic heroes, presented her with the £10,000 prize at a ceremony in Edinburgh on Saturday.

Rose Matafeo wins Edinburgh best comedy show award

August 25, 2018TheGuardian

New Zealander’s show about sex and modern social mores scoops top comedy gong

New Zealander Rose Matafeo has won the coveted best comedy show award at the Edinburgh fringe festival.

Steve Coogan, one of Matafeo’s comic heroes, presented her with the £10,000 prize at a ceremony in Edinburgh on Saturday.

Sharks, standups and 9ft women: Edinburgh festival 2018 – in pictures

August 25, 2018TheGuardian

As this year’s fringe wraps up, look back at some of the shows photographed by Murdo MacLeod in Edinburgh

Larry Dean: Bampot review – cheeky, chatty, all-smiles comedy

August 25, 2018TheGuardian

Assembly Checkpoint, Edinburgh
Dean is a standup with the popular touch and an easy swing to his style. Just don’t go expecting anything high-concept

Wednesday was a day of ups and downs for standup Larry Dean. In the afternoon: a maiden nomination for the Edinburgh comedy award. Early evening: show derailed by a woman having an epileptic fit in the front row. Dean dealt with the incident as well as possible, but it disturbed his flow as the gig stopped, started and stopped again. At the end, I left with the impression of another solid and enjoyable set by the Glasgow man, but no advance on his previous work. On other days, he may make a stronger impact.

The show was intended, Dean tells us, to be a celebration of loved-up life with his Australian boyfriend. But that relationship ended just before the fringe, so – one hasty rewrite later – we get a set ranging across his childhood, family, sex life and recent breakup. Much feels familiar from previous shows: the blokey take on his homosexuality; his hoity-toity mum; jokes about his Catholicism. My heart didn’t exactly soar at the routine about masturbating in a public toilet while someone is pooing next door. Another, about fellating a slimmer with “excess skin”, is no more high-minded but comes with a choice word-picture (“I felt like one of those Victorian photographers …”) to recommend it.

Tessa Coates: ‘The funniest TV show? The Royle Family’

August 24, 2018TheGuardian

Writer, standup and member of sketch group Massive Dad on the things that make her laugh the most

Eddie Izzard. He’s wonderful now, but the really early stuff is something else: babies on spikes, le singe est dans l’arbre, cake or death, Agatha, Bagatha and Tabitha. Oh, he’s the best.

Glenn Moore review

August 24, 2018TheGuardian

Just the Tonic @ The Tron, Edinburgh
Supposedly the story of his attempt to go on a mission to Mars, Moore’s set is actually a string of high-quality jokes

Comedy is not just about jokes, as we comedy types like to whinge – usually when Dave’s joke of the fringe top 10 is released to widespread nonplusment. But sometimes, jokes are precisely what it’s about – the time you spend at Glenn Moore’s show being a perfect example. Moore’s set – now nominated for the Edinburgh comedy award – is the best showcase of pure joke-writing skill I’ve seen on the fringe. They keep coming at you, and back at you, throughout the show, which purports to relate why Moore has applied to go on the first civilian mission to Mars. If he ever gets there, the little green men won’t know what’s hit them.

It’s richer than a straightforward battery of one-liners would be because Moore has threaded them into a story; and because (disavowing a career-long commitment to frivolous fictions) he pretends that the story is true. That’s just a game, of course, a wrong-way-up way of celebrating the ludicrousness of Moore’s shtick, as he introduces his flatmate, a surgeon who operates after all-night drinking sprees, and his inamorata, with whom he has sex so wild that “afterwards, we exchanged insurance details”.

Felicity Ward: Busting a Nut review – a jumble sale of jokes

August 23, 2018TheGuardian

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
From gags about vintage frocks to her toilet roll-hoarding mother-in-law, Ward is endearing, if under-powered

Not every Edinburgh comedy set needs a theme, story or tear-jerking finale. But it helps when the material coheres; when something turns a series of unrelated routines into a show. Aussie comedian Felicity Ward has assembled such sets in the past, addressing everything from her mental health to irritable bowel syndrome in smart, swaggering standup. But this year’s show, Busting a Nut, has no binding agent, save Ward’s livewire personality. It’s just a 60-minute club set ranging around such subjects as inspirational quotes, having a big nose and recent holidays.

That absence of narrative and argument puts pressure on the jokes. And for me, they don’t quite plug the gap. To begin, our host is newly married and living with her husband’s parents. Mother-in-law is a “feeder”, she says, and a hoarder of toilet rolls. The wedding is recalled, with a pedicure set piece (big-hitting if cut from familiar comic cloth) and a routine about Ward’s quest for a “vintage” frock. There’s a nice conceit casting the wind on Fuerteventura as a predatory man and a choice one-liner about yoga.

Lazy Susan: Forgive Me, Mother! review – brilliant send-up of #MeToo anxiety

August 22, 2018TheGuardian

Assembly George Square, Edinburgh
Sketch duo Celeste Dring and Freya Parker are unstoppable in an outrageous and irreverent hour for ‘ladies and predators’

‘Good afternoon, ladies and predators!” A host of comedy shows this year have addressed #MeToo, but none quite like sketch duo Lazy Susan’s. Rather than interrogate the climate of anxiety about male misbehaviour – or respond with disclosures of their own – in Forgive Me, Mother!, Celeste Dring and Freya Parker send the whole thing up. It is the most irreverent approach possible, and – as it collapses under Parker’s terror of the threat posed by male audience members – the show soars above anything the duo have previously done.

They’ve always been good, but they have tended to conceal themselves behind their characters. Not so here, where the sketches play second fiddle to the drama of Dring and Parker getting from one end of the show to the other. In a blizzard of an opening, the first questions to navigate are: does the show have an agenda? (nope) and what will we be saying about it afterwards? (Cue banal imagined post-show dialogues.) We’re presented with one gallery of “Sexy women … with a catch” and another of characters who won’t appear in the show, of which the gamine from the French movie written by a man (“Dance with me, Thomas! Dance with me in the rain!”) is a standout.

Edinburgh Comedy award shortlist includes Ahir Shah and Rose Matafeo

August 22, 2018TheGuardian

Felicity Ward, Alex Edelman, Glenn Moore, Larry Dean and Kieran Hodgson also among standups in the running for £10,000 main prize – but the list has some striking omissions

The shortlist has been announced for the 2018 Edinburgh Comedy award, and it’s the most traditional lineup the prize has seen for years. In what will be seen as a shortlist for standup purists, the Jewish American act Alex Edelman features with his show about gatecrashing a Nazi meeting, the terrific New Zealander Rose Matafeo gets her first (and overdue) nomination and, with the only show that’s not straight standup, Yorkshireman Kieran Hodgson is nominated for ’75, a storytelling show about the pre-history of Brexit.

Also included – and competing for a prize won last year by Hannah Gadsby’s Netflix phenomenon Nanette – are Ahir Shah (following up on his 2017 nod) with a set about visiting his deported Indian grandmother in the wake of the Windrush scandal, and the veteran Aussie comic Felicity Ward. Gags-man Glenn Moore makes a maiden appearance on the shortlist, and local hero Larry Dean, from Glasgow, is nominated for his breakup show Bampot after a Best Newcomer mention back in 2015.

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