TheGuardian – Page 216 – ComedyNews.Org :: Comedy News Organization

Paul Mayhew-Archer: ‘I want to show people with Parkinson’s can do comedy

July 20, 2018TheGuardian

The writer of The Vicar of Dibley and Mrs Brown’s Boys discusses the funny side of living with the illness and his new Edinburgh show, Incurable Optimist

“Good news,” the comedy writer Paul Mayhew-Archer likes to say of the moment he learned he had Parkinson’s disease. “The neurologist said I could expect five good years.” There is, of course, some bad news too. “The diagnosis was seven years ago.” “You find it quite difficult to smile, don’t you?” the neurologist said to him at that fateful meeting. “Well, that could be because you just told me I’ve got Parkinson’s,” Mayhew-Archer replied.

It’s tempting to fill this entire article with Mayhew-Archer’s gags about his Parkinson’s. The fact that it takes him so long to fumble for his wallet that he never has to pay for a drink in a pub. Or the irritation that all his limbs get stiffer except for the one he’d occasionally like to get stiff. Immediately after his diagnosis, he decided he could either laugh or cry about Parkinson’s. He chose to laugh, and is now taking the one-man show he’s developed around the disease to the Edinburgh festival.

I have more difficulty getting out of the bath. On the other hand, I quite like being in the bath

End of the Pier review – Les Dennis plays a washed-up standup in Blackpool comedy

July 17, 2018TheGuardian

Park theatre, London
The politics of comedy is examined through the prism of faltering father and son comedians played by Les Dennis and Blake Harrison

‘I realised why I never liked jokes,” says a character in Danny Robins’s new play, channelling comedian-of-the-moment Hannah Gadsby. “It’s because they’re almost always based on a lie.” So should standups make people laugh, or tell their truth? And what if the standup in question – a TV superstar, loved by millions – is a closet bigot? That’s the stuff of End of the Pier, an argument about comedy that flares occasionally into dramatic life.

It begins in the Blackpool home of ex-comic Bobby (rumpled Les Dennis), whose career was destroyed when a Guardian journalist, no less, shopped him for telling racist jokes. Today, he’s visited by his son Michael (The Inbetweeners’ Blake Harrison), a primetime comedy star now fretting over the career-threatening fallout from a stag night gone awry. Enter Michael’s snooty wife Jenna (Tala Gouveia), and the stage is set for schematic debates about class, comedy and PC, and plenty of improbable exposition, as family members spout backstory at one another as if they’ve never met before.

The Muppets Take the O2 review – Kermit quips with Kylie in a riot of silliness

July 15, 2018TheGuardian

O2 Arena, London
The anarchic comedy crew’s first ever UK date offers warmth, wit and mischief in an irresistible cavalcade of songs, skits and incongruous celebs

The Muppets long since conquered TV and the movies, and there’s been talk of a stage musical since Disney bought the franchise more than a decade ago. It hasn’t materialised – but last autumn, the furry ensemble tipped up at the Hollywood Bowl with this variety spectacular, a scaled-up version of the 70s TV show that made their name. To those of us who grew up with The Muppet Show, it offers a dreamy hit of nostalgia. To anyone else, it must still be a winning – if sometimes arbitrary – cavalcade of songs, skits and incongruous celebs, all marshalled by Jim Henson’s endearingly anarchic sock-puppet-and-stuffed-toy crew.

The conceit is that the Muppets have arrived with 30 minutes of material, only to discover that the O2 expects two hours-plus. “So just … stre-e-e-etch,” stage manager Scooter instructs MC Kermit the Frog – offering a hostage to fortune should what follow feel thinly spread. Sometimes, it does. There are several non-sequitur sketches – such as the skulls and ghouls singing “The Boo Danube” – whose absence few would regret. But they add to the show’s bricolage character. Nothing hangs around too long; the show never drags.

The Muppets Take the O2 review – Kermit quips with Kylie in a riot of silliness

July 15, 2018TheGuardian

O2 Arena, London
The anarchic comedy crew’s first ever UK date offers warmth, wit and mischief in an irresistible cavalcade of songs, skits and incongruous celebs

The Muppets long since conquered TV and the movies, and there’s been talk of a stage musical since Disney bought the franchise more than a decade ago. It hasn’t materialised – but last autumn, the furry ensemble tipped up at the Hollywood Bowl with this variety spectacular, a scaled-up version of the 70s TV show that made their name. To those of us who grew up with The Muppet Show, it offers a dreamy hit of nostalgia. To anyone else, it must still be a winning – if sometimes arbitrary – cavalcade of songs, skits and incongruous celebs, all marshalled by Jim Henson’s endearingly anarchic sock-puppet-and-stuffed-toy crew.

The conceit is that the Muppets have arrived with 30 minutes of material, only to discover that the O2 expects two hours-plus. “So just … stre-e-e-etch,” stage manager Scooter instructs MC Kermit the Frog – offering a hostage to fortune should what follow feel thinly spread. Sometimes, it does. There are several non-sequitur sketches – such as the skulls and ghouls singing “The Boo Danube” – whose absence few would regret. But they add to the show’s bricolage character. Nothing hangs around too long; the show never drags.

Funny bones run in the family as fringe plays host to comic dynasties

July 14, 2018TheGuardian

This year’s Edinburgh festival features many young standups with parents – from Mark Steel to Gyles Brandreth – who blazed the same trail

Among the many voices booming out across comedy venues next month during Edinburgh’s fringe festival, several will sound strangely familiar. It might be the accent, the style of delivery or even the pace of the joke-telling that eventually gives away the identity of these performers.

The sons and daughters of some of the country’s best-known comedians are establishing themselves in their own right on the festival scene. And this Edinburgh will see stronger evidence than ever of a growing stream of second-generation talent.

My sense of humour was born out of my mother’s vocal gymnastics and my dad’s desire to needle people

Jim Gaffigan review – a miscellany of jokes from a master of sardonicism

July 13, 2018TheGuardian

Leicester Square theatre, London
With his expert delivery, the US standup can lead even unpromising and overfamiliar material to giddy heights of comic dismay

Jim Gaffigan is touring the world, and he has jokes about every destination to show for it. Belgium? It was designed by 19-year-olds. New Zealand? Here’s a novel explanation for settlers’ uncommonly equitable treaty with the Māori …

I wouldn’t call globetrotting the subject of Gaffigan’s show – there is no subject. But he is taking the opportunity to unspool his miscellany of jokes about world tourism, from Anne Frank’s house and Ireland’s debt to the Vikings and beyond. But the same Viking gag – and a fair few others in the show – cropped up when Gaffigan last visited London, 18 months ago. He has not really created a new show; this is just a slightly refreshed collection of his jokes. Maybe the diminished novelty explains why it feels like a weaker set. There is a low-wattage section midway on castles and museums. A final bit, about his colonoscopy, is not notably distinct from many other middle-aged male comics’ routines about the same undignified procedure.

Jim Gaffigan review – a miscellany of jokes from a master of sardonicism

July 13, 2018TheGuardian

Leicester Square theatre, London
With his expert delivery, the US standup can lead even unpromising and overfamiliar material to giddy heights of comic dismay

Jim Gaffigan is touring the world, and he has jokes about every destination to show for it. Belgium? It was designed by 19-year-olds. New Zealand? Here’s a novel explanation for settlers’ uncommonly equitable treaty with the Māori …

I wouldn’t call globetrotting the subject of Gaffigan’s show – there is no subject. But he is taking the opportunity to unspool his miscellany of jokes about world tourism, from Anne Frank’s house and Ireland’s debt to the Vikings and beyond. But the same Viking gag – and a fair few others in the show – cropped up when Gaffigan last visited London, 18 months ago. He has not really created a new show; this is just a slightly refreshed collection of his jokes. Maybe the diminished novelty explains why it feels like a weaker set. There is a low-wattage section midway on castles and museums. A final bit, about his colonoscopy, is not notably distinct from many other middle-aged male comics’ routines about the same undignified procedure.

Alex Edelman: ‘Picking the best Mel Brooks movie is like picking a favourite child’

July 13, 2018TheGuardian

The Edinburgh comedy award winner and millennial poster boy on the things that make him laugh the most

Brent Forrester’s “Pre-Taped Call-In Show” sketch for Mr Show or any one of the more anarchic Whitest Kids U’ Know sketches like The Grapist.

Alex Edelman: ‘Picking the best Mel Brooks movie is like picking a favourite child’

July 13, 2018TheGuardian

The Edinburgh comedy award winner and millennial poster boy on the things that make him laugh the most

Brent Forrester’s “Pre-Taped Call-In Show” sketch for Mr Show or any one of the more anarchic Whitest Kids U’ Know sketches like The Grapist.

Dylan Moran: ‘Britain is sending itself to its room and not coming down’

July 13, 2018TheGuardian

The comedian’s new show questions how to cope with the relentlessness of today’s politics. He discusses the ‘cult’ of Catholicism, his love of poetry and giving up his vices

“I’ve been doing this for a quarter of a century,” points out Dylan Moran. “I’m probably going to know about as much as I’m ever going to know on a working level. There’s a liberty in that.” It’s hard to believe so much time has passed since the Irish comic first shuffled on to the stage, cigarette and drink at the ready, and appeared not to know what on earth he was doing there. In 1996, aged 24, he became the youngest person to win the Perrier comedy award at the Edinburgh festival, and embarked on his first UK tour the year after. TV and film opportunities followed, often playing various iterations of his rumpled, grumpy stage persona: in the 1998 sitcom How Do You Want Me?, with the late Charlotte Coleman; a cameo as a shameless shoplifter in the Richard Curtis film Notting Hill; roles in the Simon Pegg vehicles Shaun of the Dead and Run, Fatboy, Run. More recently he’s appeared in the 2014 Irish film Calvary and the TV sitcom Uncle.

But the show he remains best known for is cult favourite Black Books, co-created with Graham Linehan, in which Moran took centre stage as the operatically bad-tempered secondhand bookshop owner Bernard Black, a petty tyrant to his sweet-natured assistant, played by Bill Bailey. An extended love letter to booze, fags, dusty bookshops and stubborn individuality, it ran for three series, from 2000 to 2004, and still inspires enormous affection.

Standup was like throwing my cards in the air – or trying on a suit that fits and it’s just perfect

This country has two zombie political parties having a pretend show of political debate that will never lead to anything

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: