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Maria Bamford review – hard-won hilarity redefines quirky

March 23, 2018TheGuardian

Leicester Square theatre, London
The celebrated standup mines her self-doubt and general bafflement with life in a fine hour of extreme idiosyncrasy

The sense of event is palpable at Leicester Square theatre before this rare UK gig for the celebrated US standup Maria Bamford. Star of her own Netflix series Lady Dynamite, and trailing “world’s funniest” superlatives from her fellow comics, Bamford is making her London debut, surprisingly – a dozen years after her last Edinburgh fringe run. And she doesn’t disappoint: this is an hour of extreme idiosyncrasy, from a comic – and, one suspects, a human being – quite incapable of looking at the world in the same way as anyone else.

Bamford performs an artless ‘song’ about the pitched battle she and her husband stage between love and mutual irritation

Sara Schaefer review – US comic considers our fetish for the moral high-ground

March 21, 2018TheGuardian

Soho theatre, London
The standup critiques virtue-signalling modern culture in a thoughtful set argued with a light touch

‘Do you guys remember truth?” Sara Schaefer is over from America to discuss life in the eye of the post-truth, pre-apocalypse, Trumped-up maelstrom. She uses the past to illuminate the present, both publicly (pining for a time when public figures were still susceptible to shame) and privately. Schaefer was raised a zealous Christian, and her nostalgia for moral absolutes is not unrelated, she implies, to her flight from the religious certainties of her youth.

It’s a thoughtful show that becomes a lot more effective, comedy-wise, as it progresses. As Schaefer acknowledges, it starts slowly: “I’m just taking my time. I’m making it this uncomfortable on purpose.” Awkward pauses yawn between jokes; she kills the first big laugh, five minutes in, by letting it lapse into enveloping silence. Later, she apologises, citing jetlag and an anxiety attack the night before. Certainly, she’s a different performer by the halfway mark, when her critique of confrontational, virtue-signalling modern culture begins to coalesce.

Opera isn’t elitest. If I can learn to love it so can anybody | Chris Addison

March 21, 2018TheGuardian

Only a handful of people can sing in this visceral, thrilling way – but the feelings they evoke are universal

The best thing I’ve ever seen, in all my long and misspent years hanging around comedy gigs, wasn’t standup. It was opera. Back in the late 90s, I was standing at the bar in one of the spit-and-stale-beer clubs where I cut my teeth, watching the MC corral the usual drunken Friday-night punters. He lighted on a woman in her early 20s at a table down the front and asked “What do you do?” “I’m an opera student,” she replied to general raucous disbelief. “Oh, yeah?” twinkled the compere, smelling pretentious blood (and what MC wouldn’t? An opera singer and a student – that, friends, is a double whammy), “Give us a song, then.” So she did. The gleeful muttering and ironic applause stuttered out when she stood and sang : Puccini’s O mio babbino caro, which, like pretty much everyone else there, I knew at that point only either as the tune from A Room With a View or an ad we couldn’t quite place.

It was incredible: the clarity of her voice, the pureness, the emotion. Such an odd and striking thing to hear in a room where most of the time what comes from the mouths of the performers is soaked in self-conscious irony. And what a reaction! I’ve never seen a four-pints-down crowd focus like that; there was a stillness to the place – a wonder, really – as she sang. And when she finished, they went crazy. Standing screaming crazy. X Factor final audience the-guy-whose-gran-died-just-won crazy.

You’re listening to the most basic human tool of communication – the voice – used in an almost impossibly superhuman way

Flight of the Conchords review – business time again, with irresistible new songs

March 17, 2018TheGuardian

Milton Keynes theatre
Brett McKenzie and Jemaine Clement return with a magisterial performance

“Some of you are probably thinking, ‘Gosh, they look a lot older,’” says Bret McKenzie, during one of Flight of the Conchords’ deliciously pregnant inter-song pauses. It is a remark met with a wall of knowing laughter: the screens either side of the stage succeed in underlining the star status of the duo, but also in highlighting the flecks of grey peppering their hair. Since they were last in the UK, the New Zealanders may indeed have become “dustier”, they may even have become rustier, but the pair are keen to reassure their Milton Keynes audience that they still know how to rock.

his confidence isn’t misplaced. The Conchords have lost neither their beguiling, monotonous demeanour nor their ability to perform laugh-out-loud, foot-tapping bangers while simultaneously deconstructing them. How easy it would have been to perform nothing but the hits – yet more than half of the 15 songs they play are comparatively new.

Jack Barry: ‘I recently dreamed that a telepathic baby summoned me to its house’

March 16, 2018TheGuardian

The standup and Chinese graduate on the things that make him laugh the most

I want to be nice and say one of my friends but that feels like a waste when this article is supposed to be about promoting me. So I’m going to say it’s me.

Jack Barry: ‘I recently dreamed that a telepathic baby summoned me to its house’

March 16, 2018TheGuardian

The standup and Chinese graduate on the things that make him laugh the most

I want to be nice and say one of my friends but that feels like a waste when this article is supposed to be about promoting me. So I’m going to say it’s me.

Jim Bowen obituary

March 14, 2018TheGuardian

Comedian and host of the long-running TV gameshow Bullseye

Jim Bowen, who has died aged 80, claimed he was the fifth choice to host the long-running TV gameshow Bullseye, but the friendly northern comedian proved to be the perfect fit for the role. After a slow start in 1981, shuttling around the schedules, Bullseye’s unsophisticated mix of darts and trivia attracted early Sunday evening audiences of 17 million. For 14 years, accompanied by the show’s mascot, Bully, Bowen delivered the catchphrases: “Keep out of the black, and in the red; there’s nothing in this game for two in a bed” and “Have a look at what you would have won”.

The ITV show brought its host a Rolls-Royce, a house in the country and enduring fame, thanks in part to a catchphrase – “Super, smashing, great” – that he claimed he never actually said. (Although, when one contestant explained that he was unemployed, Bowen did instinctively reply, “Smashing”.) At his 1980s peak, Bowen earned more than £500,000 a year from Bullseye and his standup bookings.

‘Non-stop gagster and comedy scientist’: Paul O’Grady, Alan Davies and Frank Cottrell Boyce on Ken Dodd

March 13, 2018TheGuardian

Paul O’Grady’s family cheered him outside court. Alan Davies couldn’t get a word in over lunch. And he got Frank Cottrell Boyce by the chuckle muscle. Stars remember the brilliantly bizarre comedian

If Doddy was doing a show in Liverpool, it was always packed out. He had a fabulous imagination that gripped children and adults. As a kid I got the Diddymen annual and would see him at the theatre and just be completely entranced. At Christmas we’d watch him on TV at my auntie’s. She’d scream with laughter. My auntie and my mum used to go and stand outside the courts to show support during the trial over his taxes. When he came out, they’d shout: “We’re behind you, Ken! Good luck, lad!” He was very much loved in Liverpool.

Ken Dodd, the man from Mirthy-side: a career in clips and 10 of his best jokes

March 12, 2018TheGuardian

From the Diddymen to dissecting northern humour, the Liverpudlian’s sense of absurdity never deserted him

My agent died at 90. I always think he was 100 and kept 10% for himself.

I do all the exercises every morning in front of the television – up, down, up, down, up, down. Then the other eyelid.

How many men does it take to change a toilet roll? Nobody knows. It’s never been tried.

What a beautiful day for dashing down to Trafalgar Square and chucking a bucket of whitewash over the pigeons and saying ‘There you are, how do you like it?’

I have kleptomania. But when it gets bad, I take something for it.

What a beautiful day for Dame Nellie Melba to drop a choc-ice down her tights and say ‘How’s that for a knickerbocker glory?’

You’ve got to be a comedian to live there. I call it Mirthy-side.

What a lovely day for knocking on a TV policeman’s door and saying: ‘Hello Mrs Savalas. Have you got a licence for your Telly?’

Did any of us, in our wildest dreams, think we’d live long enough to see the end of the DFS sale?

My dad knew I was going to be a comedian. When I was a baby, he said, ‘Is this a joke?’

Ken Dodd discussing northern humour on Late Night Line-Up in 1965 pic.twitter.com/qMYkbjGpbz

Tickling sticks laid in tribute at Ken Dodd’s Liverpool home

March 12, 2018TheGuardian

Fans remember comedy legend who ‘broke the mould’ at house where he was born and died

A pile of flowers and feather dusters – or “tickling sticks” – has begun to grow outside the 18th-century house in Knotty Ash, Liverpool, where the comedian Ken Dodd was born and died.

Allan Grice, a 71-year-old former senior fire officer, made the three-hour journey from Wakefield in West Yorkshire to Dodd’s home to hand-deliver a card of condolence, after hearing of the comedian’s death on the radio early on Monday.

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