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Ahir Shah review – a call to arms against political complacency

August 22, 2017TheGuardian

Laughing Horse @ Cabaret Voltaire, Edinburgh
The astute standup drills into the divided, dysfunctional state of our world in a combative hour of coruscating comedy

“I’m left, I’m liberal and I’m losing,” says Ahir Shah, but with this new show, Control, he’s not going down without a fight. It’s a piledriver hour about the rise of authoritarianism, and the eclipse of the liberal values many of us took for granted. It’s not uplifting: those looking for good cheer should look elsewhere. Shah finds plenty of laughs in the benighted state of the world, and his reaction to it – but alarm, not amusement, is the keynote. Shah is horrified, and angry, and he’s not soft-soaping that for easy laughs.

The opening stages are deceptive, as Shah warns against tarring Leave voters as racists. As his vegan-who-likes-Nando’s analogy proves, you can join bad teams for innocent reasons. But the tenor of the show contradicts this equable introduction. The deeper Shah drills into Trumpism and the nativist landscape, the more he finds racism at its root. “Take this country back” begs the question “from whom?” – and Shah thinks the answer’s obvious. Fashionable political ideas about “the common man” and the “victims of globalisation” are just code, he argues, for wanting a white monoculture.

Ken Cheng’s pound coin gag voted Edinburgh fringe’s funniest joke

August 21, 2017TheGuardian

Comedian who quit Cambridge University for online poker says both his careers are based on ‘extreme punishment or reward’

They say comedy can be found in the most banal of subjects, and the 2017 winner of Dave’s Funniest Joke of the Fringe award puts that theory to the test.

Proving that even money can be funny, Ken Cheng has won this year’s accolade with his one-liner on the UK’s redesigned currency: “I’m not a fan of the new pound coin, but then again, I hate all change.”

Iain Stirling review – the voice of Love Island speaks out

August 21, 2017TheGuardian

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
Fans have flocked to hear him spill the beans on the islanders, but instead we get some sharply expressed though extremely familiar standup material

Edinburgh native Iain Stirling has been bringing comedy shows to the fringe for most of a decade, but only this year has he sold out his four-week run in advance, and announced extra gigs in the 750-seat Pleasance Grand. So what’s new? In two words: Love Island. Stirling is the narrator of the water-cooler TV hit of the summer, and plenty are here to see him spill the beans on Chris, Camilla, Marcel and co. What they get instead is an hour of meat-and-potatoes standup from a prematurely ageing 29-year-old, whose broadsides against maturity and domesticity are as sharply expressed as they are extremely familiar.

There’s enough in the show to keep Stirling’s legion of new fans entertained. He announces himself, faux miffed, as the comic whose voice is more recognisable than his face, and is soon implying heavy scorn for Marcel Somerville’s megabucks book deal. “I’ve made idiots into millionaires,” quips our host. But he engages only skin-deeply with the Love Island phenomenon, embarking instead on a dismayed routine about the gentrification of Leith in the years since he and his teenage mates visited for a whiff of junkies-and-sex-work exoticism.

Phil Wang: Kinabalu review – patriotism, privilege and lots of lube

August 21, 2017TheGuardian

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
Ethnicity and empire are tricky subjects, but not for someone living the immigrant dream and riffing on race with a childlike glee

‘I finally became a man this year,” says 27-year-old Phil Wang, citing a first purchase of lube as the threshold to adulthood. He’s certainly come of age as a comic: the smart and funny Kinabalu is his best set by a distance, showcasing a newfound ease and confidence as he ranges across childhood memories and heroic deaths, male feminism and broodiness. And race: the show’s headline-grabbing moments find the Malaysian-born son of English and Chinese parents shelving the lube to speak against the grain about patriotism, ethnicity and empire.

Comedian Phil Wang: ‘I enjoy a level of patriotism that only immigrants can have’

August 20, 2017TheGuardian

The British-Malaysian comic on why conversations about race in the UK have become absurd, his favourite standups and how to outdo a rival’s nipple tassels

You talk a lot in your show about having one foot in British society and one foot out of it.

I’ve always felt like an outsider. I was always the white guy in Malaysia [where he lived until 2006], and then the Chinese guy in the UK. I think that sort of thing is quite common in comedy, not quite belonging.

Spider-Man’s dad, Ruby Wax and Labour v Tory standup: Edinburgh festival 2017 – in pictures

August 19, 2017TheGuardian

The Edinburgh festival 2017 is still going strong with unlikely film stars, black-history monologues and toddler comedy sidekicks – here’s a selection of the latest shows photographed by Murdo MacLeod

Spider-Man’s dad, Ruby Wax and Labour v Tory standup: Edinburgh festival 2017 – in pictures

August 19, 2017TheGuardian

The Edinburgh festival 2017 is still going strong with unlikely film stars, black-history monologues and toddler comedy sidekicks – here’s a selection of the latest shows photographed by Murdo MacLeod

Hannah Gadsby review – electrifying farewell to standup

August 19, 2017TheGuardian

Assembly George Square, Edinburgh
Comedy proves inadequate consolation for battling the patriarchy in the Tasmanian standup’s uncomfortable but indelible swansong

Hannah Gadsby’s extraordinary Nanette arrives in Edinburgh trailing plaudits from its Australian run. But it is, she announces, her swansong: “I’m quitting comedy. Done. Bored.” Gadsby has lost patience with the elisions and deceptions standup entails. “I’ve made my story into a joke,” she says, in a show that’s passionately concerned with challenging the (patriarchal, heteronormative) stories our culture tells itself. There are jokes in Nanette, too: some good ones, initially. But they dry up – and something more confrontational, an angry repudiation of the consolations of comedy, takes their place.

The superhero and the standup: Spider-Man Tom Holland and his dad Dominic

August 19, 2017TheGuardian

The star of Marvel’s blockbuster is the subject of his father’s comedy show at the Edinburgh fringe. They discuss the art of getting laughs, sending Spidey back to school and finding the old man a part in a webslinging sequel

There is no shortage of up-and-coming comedians with famous parents at this year’s Edinburgh fringe: Elliot Steel (son of Mark), Will Hislop (son of Ian) and Ruby Wax’s daughters, Maddy and Marina Bye, are all performing. At the Voodoo Rooms venue in the New Town, the situation is a little different. Standup Dominic Holland, who recently turned 50, is in Edinburgh with a free fringe show, 24 years after winning the best newcomer award at the festival. The subject of his new set? How his success has been surpassed by that of his 21-year-old son, Tom, star of Marvel’s latest blockbuster, Spider-Man: Homecoming.

“I genuinely don’t need to be here,” Dominic states in his show, Eclipsed, with reference to his son’s lucrative webslinging contract. He describes his own gig as “indoor busking” – it’s free to get in but he holds a bucket for punters’ donations on their way out. Tom is currently filming sci-fi thriller Chaos Walking, co-starring Daisy Ridley and based on Patrick Ness’s book trilogy, but has flown in from Canada to see the show with his family. It’s a surprise for his dad and, when I meet the two of them afterwards, they whip out a phone to play the video of Dominic’s ecstatic reaction when Tom turned up that morning.

Mum must have countless Spider-Man costumes that all of us boys have worn through the years

Ivo Graham: ‘Shaving my head was meant to give me an air of mystery and menace. It did not’

August 18, 2017TheGuardian

The up-and-coming standup whiz spills the beans about the things that make him laugh the most, from Lucky Jim to A Fish Called Wanda

Henry Paker at Edinburgh in 2010. Him, the surrealist maverick “unreading the Bible” in his hoodigan. Me, the spotty teenager coming to watch every day on my own.

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