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Comedy in a care home: the standups taking slapstick into new territory

November 21, 2017TheGuardian

The residents were expecting bingo. Instead they got lessons in strawberry spitting, a Railway Children spoof – and a stuntman stripping to his underpants…

Monday afternoon is usually bingo time at the Madelayne Court care home, in the village of Broomfield, near Chelmsford. So today’s activity comes as a surprise to many comfortably seated residents: striding on stage in front of them is former Neighbours actor Nathan Lang – he’s dressed as a stuntman and preparing to leap through a hoop he’s pretending is on fire.

“You’ve lost it!” hollers one elderly spectator, and Lang does look momentarily perplexed. How do you deal with hecklers here?

‘What responses will they get? says a resident called Margaret. ‘Probably dead silence’

‘Ever milked a cow?’ Helen Duff asks a woman called Audrey – and suddenly memories of her life on a farm re-emerge

Ronny Chieng review – Daily Show comic’s slick set is derailed by a heckle

November 21, 2017TheGuardian

Soho theatre, London
The standup and International Student sitcom star delivers jaunty routines about US life but the show suffers when he reacts to a heckler

“I have a tone problem,” reckons Ronny Chieng: everything he says sounds angry or sarcastic. In the past, that’s been to the detriment of his standup, but it’s less the case here in his first London outing since becoming a correspondent on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. He dials down the scorn (a little) in this set, which is going with a swing – until he gets heckled for a routine defending the “creepy” amorous behaviour of the teenage male, at which point his tone problem resurfaces to unpleasant effect.

If you’re coming at him via his sitcom, International Student – routinely described as sweet and charming – you’ll barely recognise onstage Chieng. Slick and high-handed, he kicks off with an extended routine about living in the States: a land of consumerist abundance and turbo-charged convenience.

Sarah Silverman: ‘Jokes I made 15 years ago I’d not make today’

November 19, 2017TheGuardian

Sarah Silverman’s comedy has always aimed a laser into the dark corners of sexism, racism and religion. But now she’s using her wit to make sense of the huge issues facing America. Sophie Heawood meets her in Hollywood

Arriving at the Hollywood studio complex where Sarah Silverman has her office, I am surprised to find nobody can tell me where it is. She’s one of the biggest comedians in America, but it takes 15 minutes of shrugged shoulders and wrong turns before I find a door with a handwritten sign: “If you feel unwell turn around and go home and rest! Do not walk thru this door! You are loved, feel better! Sarah!” So far, so adorable.

Germs and visitors might struggle to make their way past reception, but dogs are clearly welcomed like sacred Indian cows here: two of them trot past me unaccompanied. The animals have just left a script meeting in the writers’ room, soon to be followed by a gaggle of comedy writers, including Silverman herself, who is wearing glasses and stopping to stare at her phone. Once installed on the sofa in her own room, with an assistant bringing her black tea, she admits she didn’t realise this interview was in person, hence the phone. “But you’re here!” she says, getting her legs comfy on the furniture. “Great!” Her impromptu welcome is so friendly and her smile so full of shiny teeth, that it only occurs to me afterwards that she might be lying through them – surely nobody wants to be surprised by a journalist.

I live in a little apartment and the washer dryer for the whole floor is in the hallway

I saw my boss was fully jerking off in front of me. And I just said… ‘I have to clean the popcorn machine’

Putting people into power who are addicted to money is like giving cokeheads mountains of cocaine

No holds barred and funny as hell: the fierce humour of Margaret Cho

November 19, 2017TheGuardian

One of America’s most politically outspoken standups is finally bringing her savage brand of comedy to Britain

If you have never heard of Margaret Cho, think the caustic, crude comedy of Joan Rivers, the politically-charged jibes of Bill Hicks and the quick-witted improvisation of Robin Williams – all rolled into one but with a feisty Korean twist. Now the US comedian is about to embark on a UK tour, starting in Edinburgh on 25 November and ending at the O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire on 10 December.

Cho is a five-time Grammy and Emmy nominee and a household name in America, and earlier this year Rolling Stone magazine named her as one of the 50 best standup comics of all time. She has worked with all the above comics, and others such as Jerry Seinfeld, but says her greatest mentor and influence was Rivers. “I try to carry on her legacy,” she says. “I feel like I learned everything I know from her.”

There’s a lot about Trump, race and sexuality. I get to talk about all that stuff which I think is really important

I was a dad at 17, now I’m a grandad at 40 – it saved my life

November 18, 2017TheGuardian

Gary Meikle has forged a career in standup after finding inspiration from his life as a single dad. He also tried material about being a grandad, but audiences didn’t believe he was old enough to be one

When Gary Meikle was 17, he had sex in a cupboard at a party with a girl he barely knew. A child was conceived, and later born. In 99.9% of cases like this (I am making up the statistic, but you get the drift), a teenage dad would not play much part in raising his accidental child, and would probably have lost contact with her by the time she reached adulthood. But Meikle is the 0.1%: not only did he raise his daughter, mostly singlehanded, but also he still lives with her and is helping her to bring up her own daughter, 12-month-old Gracie.

Gary is now a youthful-looking 40, and it seems as remarkable that he is a grandfather as that he raised his child alone. In fact, he says, he doesn’t yet use much material from his life with Gracie for his act as a standup comedian, because when he tried it, the audience thought he was bluffing and couldn’t possibly be a grandad. But his performances draw heavily on his years as a single dad raising Ainsley, who is now 22.

Greg Davies review – supremely silly standup shouts the unsayable

November 17, 2017TheGuardian

Hammersmith Apollo, London
In an exuberant new show, Davies scrutinises his own ridiculousness and goes from outre stories about his mum to a musical tribute to his dad

Greg Davies has got a trigger warning at the start of his show for every section of his fanbase. If you love him for The Inbetweeners or Man Down, you’ll be fine. Fans of Taskmaster – and of Cuckoo, even more so – may find his outre stage persona hotter to handle. This is big, delinquent and often blue comedy from the former We Are Klang man. The material would seem juvenile from a performer half his age (he’s 49), but it is largely redeemed by Davies’ infectious sense of fun and of his own ridiculousness. Life is forever ambushing this arrested developer with more evidence of his own and other people’s flamboyant idiocy – and his eagerness to share his findings is easy to submit to.

I’d call him the Peter Pan of comedy, but – what with all the farting and wanking gags – the JM Barrie estate might demur. At any rate, he gleefully avoids the road well travelled by middle-aged comics, towards world weariness and carping about how distasteful young people are. His stock-in-trade remains jokes about his mum and dad, which is good going for a near 50-year-old, the more so given that his dad died three years ago – a bereavement from which his standup show You Magnificent Beast draws its modest emotional charge. It culminates in a musical tribute to Davies’ eccentric father. But before then it’s bound only by a tenuous motif about how each of us is judged on things we might not expect and cannot control.

Lloyd Griffith: ‘I love both Mick Hucknall and Grimsby Town’

November 17, 2017TheGuardian

The standup, TV presenter and choirboy on the things that make him laugh the most

Matt Lucas as George Dawes in Shooting Stars singing Peanuts. Whenever I’m feeling down I always watch it and, by ’eck, it makes me smile.

As a comic, Al Franken joked about rape, sex robots and Afghan women

November 16, 2017TheGuardian

The Minnesota senator has apologised following allegations of sexual misconduct, and it is not the first example of his attitudes about women and sex

Senator Al Franken of Minnesota apologised on Thursday after being accused of sexually harassing the journalist Leeann Tweeden in 2006, highlighting the comedian-turned-politician’s past history of crass jokes towards women.

Are you gruesome tonight? The comedy hit splicing Evil Dead 2 and Elvis songs

November 14, 2017TheGuardian

In Sam Raimi’s horror classic, a man is tormented by demons and his own severed hand. All the story needed was a few tunes by the king of rock’n’roll, says Rob Kemp

By day, he was a mild-mannered examinations officer at a school near Wolverhampton. By night, he was a chainsaw-wielding maniac with a soft spot for Elvis numbers. No, that’s not a pitch for a B-movie, but the life of standup comic Rob Kemp. The 39-year-old will spend much of the next month commuting between the West Midlands and Soho theatre in London, shedding the briefcase and tie en route to re-enter the underworld of The Elvis Dead, his rock’n’roll-meets-horror one-man comedy show that became the cult hit of this summer’s Edinburgh fringe.

Hitherto, Kemp had been a specialist in “whimsical” (so he’s told) standup and was “bumping along largely unnoticed”. His only previous show, little seen, was a Dave Gorman-esque comedy lecture about hubris. The Elvis Dead (it’s a retelling of Evil Dead 2 set to the music of Elvis Presley) was dreamed up in conversation with a friend, based on Kemp’s supposed resemblance to horror icon Bruce Campbell. “There was nothing cynical about it,” he says, in case you’re thinking that the Elvis/Evil Dead mashup was a ruthlessly commercial cash-in. “I just wanted to write something that I knew my mates would enjoy.”

Kathy Griffin review – Trump’s nemesis laughs away the pain of persecution

November 12, 2017TheGuardian

London Palladium
The standup leans too heavily on showbiz mudslinging here, but the remarkable story of the fallout from her severed-head stunt is uplifting comedy catharsis

American comic Kathy Griffin fainted on stage in Dublin last week, and there were doubts over whether this London gig would go ahead. Consider those doubts resoundingly dismissed: Griffin performed for two and a quarter hours without pause, motormouthing through screeds of showbiz gossip, self-promotion and an account of “how my life crumbled” when she posed for a photo with a bloodied Trump mask resembling the president’s severed head. The latter story is gripping, but there’s too much celebrity tattle around it at this sprawling show – at least for those of us with strictly limited interest in Kim Kardashian’s domestic life or the dissolute habits of American comedian Andy Dick.

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