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Love Songs review – comedy in the key of life

August 21, 2018TheGuardian

Underbelly Cowgate, Edinburgh
Endearing storytelling carries the day in Alissa Anne Jeun Yi’s show, combining standup, poetry and rap

Alissa Anne Jeun Yi’s flyers call her Edinburgh fringe debut a “one-woman spoken-word and rap show” but Love Songs, tucked into the corner of Underbelly at Cowgate, comes across more like standup comedy. For most of the show, Jeun Yi bounces with endearing energy from anecdote to anecdote, all loosely connected to the theme of love.

With only occasional music and props kept to a minimum, it’s the storytelling that carries the piece. We hear how her parents met at university, the love lessons she learned watching soap operas in Hong Kong, and how her mixed-race Chinese and white heritage plays into the way her womanhood is viewed by the world. The sharp observations inspire genuine laughs. One, about fancying someone with a minimal triangle wrist tattoo – “it says so much whilst saying so little!” – is a reminder millennials can really nail our own self-ridicule.

I saw a man die on stage. It was me | Brian Logan

August 21, 2018TheGuardian

He’s been derided by Daniel Kitson, shamed by Stewart Lee – and now our comedy critic has been depicted having his brains blown out by Sam Campbell. Just as well he can take a joke

I can see why you might think it’d be alarming. I’m in the audience at Sam Campbell’s nutty late-night comedy show (I would say minding my own business, but that’s not quite true) when Campbell conjures photographs of three people on his upstage screen. “These are my enemies,” he says. My companion pokes me in the ribs – one of them is me. Next thing I know, Campbell (who won the prestigious Barry award in Melbourne with this show) is pointing a gun at the three headshots. I hear the crack of a pistol, and the image of my face collapses in a burst of cartoon blood. I’ve just watched a comedian blow my brains out live on stage.

In other circumstances, this might be – as they say these days – “triggering” for me. We’re permitted, I think, to be sensitive to images of ourselves being shot in the head. But I’m a live-comedy critic, I’ve got a thick skin when it comes to offence – and it’s not a new experience for me to cower in the audience while a comedian gets laughs at my expense. I remember an Edinburgh fringe many years ago when friends kept coming up to me saying: “Have you heard what Daniel Kitson is saying about you on stage?” I hadn’t, I didn’t really want to, but I soon did. Friends, it turns out, just can’t keep incitements to sexual violence towards comedy reviewers to themselves.

What was surprising, in both Kitson and Campbell’s case, was that I’d never given either of them a bad review

John-Luke Roberts review – Spice up your life with the nonsense manifesto

August 21, 2018TheGuardian

Assembly George Square, Edinburgh
A parade of daft characters and killer gags illustrate Roberts’ credo that absurdism reflects the chaos of being alive

Left-field standup John-Luke Roberts has always been appreciated as an innovator, coining new comedies on the margins while less interesting acts grabbed the plaudits. But the sense has persisted that he is more fun on paper than in practice; that for all his well-worked experiments, he lacks a certain warmth or those elusive “funny bones”. That’s less likely to be said of his buzzy new offering, with its orthographically challenged title: All I Wanna Do Is [FX: GUNSHOTS] With a [FX: GUN RELOADING] and a [FX: CASH REGISTER] and Perform Some Comedy!

The show is entirely its own thing: a run-through of 24 hitherto unknown Spice Girls, while delivering big, out-of-nowhere gags that could easily appeal to a wide audience. It is framed as a defence of nonsense. Our host – sporting shorts, a headband and a moustache died blue, in case we didn’t know where he was coming from – thinks stories are “a fantastic way of being lied to” and that absurdism better reflects the chaos of being alive. The Spice Girls, with their neat categories (Scary, Posh and so on), were just another failed system to make the world explicable. Better to let the madness in, as Roberts does by introducing us to Facts About the Romans Spice, Twenty-Seven Babies Spice and Lady Bracknell Crossed With a Theramin Spice – a funny premise, funnily realised.

John-Luke Roberts review – Spice up your life with the nonsense manifesto

August 21, 2018TheGuardian

Assembly George Square, Edinburgh
A parade of daft characters and killer gags illustrate Roberts’ credo that absurdism reflects the chaos of being alive

Left-field standup John-Luke Roberts has always been appreciated as an innovator, coining new comedies on the margins while less interesting acts grabbed the plaudits. But the sense has persisted that he is more fun on paper than in practice; that for all his well-worked experiments, he lacks a certain warmth or those elusive “funny bones”. That’s less likely to be said of his buzzy new offering, with its orthographically challenged title: All I Wanna Do Is [FX: GUNSHOTS] With a [FX: GUN RELOADING] and a [FX: CASH REGISTER] and Perform Some Comedy!

The show is entirely its own thing: a run-through of 24 hitherto unknown Spice Girls, while delivering big, out-of-nowhere gags that could easily appeal to a wide audience. It is framed as a defence of nonsense. Our host – sporting shorts, a headband and a moustache died blue, in case we didn’t know where he was coming from – thinks stories are “a fantastic way of being lied to” and that absurdism better reflects the chaos of being alive. The Spice Girls, with their neat categories (Scary, Posh and so on), were just another failed system to make the world explicable. Better to let the madness in, as Roberts does by introducing us to Facts About the Romans Spice, Twenty-Seven Babies Spice and Lady Bracknell Crossed With a Theramin Spice – a funny premise, funnily realised.

From Beyond the Fringe to Nanette: five shows that changed the face of comedy

August 21, 2018TheGuardian

With the Edinburgh fringe in full flow, here are the five standup sets that catapulted their creators to fame

These days, as BBC comedy controller Shane Allen recently confirmed, “Oxbridge white blokes” are out of comedy fashion. Time was they were the cutting edge, as when Messrs Cook, Miller, Moore and Bennett were cherrypicked to create Beyond the Fringe. A modest success at the Edinburgh festival in August 1960, it then made a huge splash in the West End. Here, as never before, the sacred cows of postwar Britain (the political class; the royal family; the military) were led to the satirical slaughter. Kenneth Tynan’s Observer review set the agenda: this was “the moment,” he wrote, “when English comedy took its first decisive step into the second half of the 20th century.” By design or otherwise, Beyond the Fringe punched a hole through English deference and launched the 60s satire boom. Without it, would we ever have had the Establishment Club and TW3, Monty Python and Private Eye?

Camilla Cleese review – drily amusing jokes about dad

August 21, 2018TheGuardian

Assembly, George Square, Edinburgh
In a set called Produced by John Cleese, the Python’s daughter shares the bill with political standup Steve Hofstetter

Having eschewed nepotism in the past to little profit, Camilla Cleese claims: “It’s now time I shamelessly exploited my last name to see if I can make it work.” And so her new show – or at least, the bill she shares with fellow US comic Steve Hofstetter – is called Produced by John Cleese. It’s isn’t, in the theatrical sense; but Camilla is, in the offspring sense. Shameless, indeed – but the fringe is nothing if not a hustle, and it’s working for Cleese Jr, who has audiences queuing around her George Square block on the strength of her surname alone.

I’m not convinced the 34-year-old has exhausted all the other possibilities of succeeding on her own merits. She might – like thousands of other comics – have brought a full hour to Edinburgh rather than just 20-30 minutes, first in 2014 and again this year. But at least, now as then, they’re drily amusing minutes, as our host deploys for our amusement her gold-digging Californian cynic persona – albeit flecked with a vulnerability that’s presumably real. (Hofstetter later tells us that, on this particular day, Cleese was performing through illness.)

Steen Raskopoulos review – tears flow in emotionally raw comedy

August 20, 2018TheGuardian

Underbelly Cowgate, Edinburgh
The Aussie standup ditches blithe character-comedy for a brave show that is often more sad than funny

No one who’s seen the Aussie act Steen Raskopoulos would associate him with trauma-as-comedy. While Richard Gadd and Hannah Gadsby won awards for their soul-bearing shows about sexual violence, Raskopoulos just kept on supplying blithe character-comedy about mournful horses, bank robberies and interpretive dance. But his latest show, Stay, pulls back the curtain on what we thought we were getting from Raskopoulos: not multi-role solo comedy but ceaseless voices in an unhappy man’s head; not (as per his signature sketch) faux-sentimental scenes about abandoned kids, but cries for help.

The moment in Stay that first implies this is beautifully handled. But I’m not sure Raskopoulos’s sad story has quite completed – or ever will – its transformation into comedy. The latter stages are terribly raw; the 31-year-old ends the show in tears. There’s no seeming catharsis in the telling, or sense of why he’s telling this story now.

Adam Rowe’s jobcentre joke crowned funniest of Edinburgh fringe

August 19, 2018TheGuardian

Liverpool comedian follows in footsteps of Ken Cheng and Tim Vine in winning award

Comedians often strive to find laughter through the tears, and the winner of this year’s funniest joke of the Edinburgh fringe is no exception.

Adam Rowe has taken home the accolade after riffing on the challenges of being sacked. “Working at the jobcentre has to be a tense job,” he pointed out to his audience. “Knowing that if you get fired, you still have to come in the next day.”

Adam Rowe’s jobcentre joke crowned funniest of Edinburgh fringe

August 19, 2018TheGuardian

Liverpool comedian follows in footsteps of Ken Cheng and Tim Vine in winning award

Comedians often strive to find laughter through the tears, and the winner of this year’s funniest joke of the Edinburgh fringe is no exception.

Adam Rowe has taken home the accolade after riffing on the challenges of being sacked. “Working at the jobcentre has to be a tense job,” he pointed out to his audience. “Knowing that if you get fired, you still have to come in the next day.”

Mat Ewins review – hi-tech gags from multimedia noodler extraordinaire

August 19, 2018TheGuardian

Just the Tonic at the Mash House, Edinburgh
Artistry and geekery combine in a set that shows off Ewins’ clever video editing and pranksterish sense of fun

Brexit. #MeToo. Editing a newspaper on Mars. One of those isn’t a popular topic among fringe comics. Indeed, I can imagine only one comedian making a show about it. Step forward, Mat Ewins, 2017 comedy award nominee and multimedia noodler extraordinaire. Last year, he unleashed his fiendish programming and editing skills – and all-conquering sense of fun – on a spoof Indiana Jones epic. Now he ventures deeper into hi-tech tricksiness – but also reveals more of himself – in this tenuous foray into interstellar media.

It’s ceaselessly inventive and daft – and it’s “piffle” (Ewins’ word) too. How else to describe his videos of football matches with the ball removed, or his all-new Martian sport that involves catching cats with a magnetic moustache. The newspaper narrative is only ever a thread from which to hang these techie sketches, and even its denouement is constructed as a video game, in which the audience controls Ewins’ editor character in a high-stakes – and highly-ridiculous – job interview scenario.

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