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Rob Kemp: The Elvis Dead review – a gory cult classic in the making

August 18, 2017TheGuardian

Heroes @ Monkey Barrel
The comedian’s inspired mashup of Evil Dead 2 and Elvis songs is much juicier than an ironic stunt

‘This was only ever supposed to amuse me and my mates,” says Rob Kemp – blood-drenched, chainsaw-wielding, shirt in shreds. You can picture the scene: a few pints down, someone notices “Elvis” contains the word “evil”, someone else jokes about splicing the King of Rock’n’roll with classic horror movie Evil Dead 2. These conversations are usually forgotten the next morning, not turned into Edinburgh fringe shows – far fewer are late-night hits that have comedy lovers queuing around the block.

Such is the fate of Kemp’s cult-in-the-making The Elvis Dead: a solo show hijacking Elvis’s back catalogue to narrate a demons v humans bloodbath in a Tennessee woodshed. Voted best show at Leicester’s comedy festival this spring, it’s now raising the roof of a sweaty backroom in Edinburgh. The Hilton Las Vegas it ain’t, but Kemp does a good job persuading you otherwise. He looks the part, he makes a decent fist of Elvis’s chocolatey croon (although, by week two of the fringe, the top notes are slipping from his reach), and he throws himself into the enterprise like a Kandarian demon with murder on its mind.

Jon Pointing review – a cringeworthy new comic monster is unleashed

August 17, 2017TheGuardian

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
Pointing’s egocentric creep Cayden Hunter and his spoof acting masterclass is mesmerisingly ghastly and deliciously daft

Towards the end of last summer’s Edinburgh festival, tongues started wagging about Jon Pointing’s below-the-radar work-in-progress show in a graveyard shift on the free fringe. His spoof acting masterclass is back this year, developed to full length, transferred to the Pleasance Courtyard, and justifying the hype. Pointing masquerades as theatre guru Cayden Hunter – touchy-feely but thin-skinned, colossal of ego and microscopic in self-knowledge. He is the David Brent of the trust exercise and the improv game. Like Brent, Hunter at his best is so convincing you’d think his creator must be intimately familiar with his own inner prat. Or that, forced into contact with prats, he’s studied them (and his revenge on them) in minute detail.

In love with himself and patronising his audience, Hunter channels more bullshit than the sluice gates at a dairy farm. “There’s no maps for the kind of roads we’re travelling down,” he purrs. He is, in short, a creep – and yet (to Pointing’s credit) the text isn’t that improbable. Tweak the caricature down a notch, and this acting class – with its talk of risk and danger, its fetishising of “the truth”, poorly defined – is but an ace away from credible reality.

From a mime and his baby to singing sisters: Edinburgh’s comedy double acts

August 17, 2017TheGuardian

Trygve Wakenshaw has brought his one-year-old son as a sidekick, Flo and Joan search for love and Giants present the old disintegrating duo routine

For as long as there’s been comedy, there’s been the double act. Big one, small one; straight one, funny one; know-all and dimwit: these dynamics are as old as performance itself and – even on the formally inventive fringe – they inexorably reassert themselves. There are double acts for all seasons at this year’s festival: one assembled to make provocative points about race (that’s Brendon Burns and Indigenous Australian comic Craig Quartermaine), one because the third member of a sketch troupe jumped ship just before the fringe (that’s Gein’s Family Giftshop).

From scissor attacks to diabetes improv: comedians’ weirdest gigs

August 16, 2017TheGuardian

Lucy Porter caused a breakup. Romesh Ranganathan did a diabetes panel show. And Alexei Sayle survived a skinhead invasion. Comics relive their worst moments on stage

A guy in the crowd had been drunkenly obnoxious all evening so I got everyone to chant “out, out, out” until he got up to go. He gestured to his girlfriend to join him but – with my encouragement – she refused and told him he was dumped. He shuffled out and she got the biggest cheer of the night. Years later she emailed to thank me. She was now engaged to a nice man who wouldn’t dream of heckling.
• Lucy Porter is at Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh

Standups on why they quit comedy: ‘I have nightmares about having to do it again’

August 16, 2017TheGuardian

She may be one of the favourites for this year’s Edinburgh Comedy awards, but Hannah Gadsby is about to call time on her career. Here, Gadsby, Patrick Marber, Natalie Haynes and Simon Fanshawe explain why they hung up their microphones

‘Comedy’s a joke,” growls Hannah Gadsby, moments into her new show, Nanette. “There’s only so long I can pretend not to be serious.” Nanette has already won the Barry award at Melbourne International Comedy festival and is among the favourites to bag Edinburgh’s top prize, too. So why has Gadsby announced that it is to be her last ever standup show?

After 10 years as a comic, she says, she has grown frustrated with what she believes the artform can’t do – and her experience isn’t unique. Others have quit standup at the top of their game: Lee Evans is a recent example; Emma Thompson a more distant one. So are comedians uniquely subject to burnout? Is a certain kind of creative frustration in the artform’s DNA?

The 10 best jokes from the Edinburgh fringe

August 15, 2017TheGuardian

From infidelity to insomnia and taxidermy … the funniest gags we have heard so far from this year’s standup shows

Robert Garnham: Insomnia is awful. But on the plus side – only three more sleeps till Christmas.

Dan Antopolski: Centaurs shop at Topman. And Bottomhorse.

Edinburgh star Mae Martin: ‘People refer to me as ‘innocent’, which makes me feel disingenuous’

August 15, 2017TheGuardian

The Canadian comic may look like she needs ID to get into her own shows, but her Fringe show is her frankest (and funniest) yet

‘I love being gut-wrenchingly honest,” says elfin comic Mae Martin when we meet in an Edinburgh cafe. “It’s so satisfying.” Other standups booked on the same bill as her should consider themselves forewarned. “I find it hard not to say personal things when I’m compering. Like the other night, I was introducing a friend and I told the audience: ‘This guy’s great, we had a threesome once …’ He was, like: ‘What are you doing?’ The crowd heckled him so much. All they wanted to hear about was the threesome.” She gives the sort of bashful, butter-wouldn’t-melt smile that enables her to get away with anything on stage. “I really need to be careful.”

Now may not be the best time to start. The Toronto-born, London-based comedian, who is 30 but would surely need to produce ID to be allowed into one of her own shows, is at the fringe with Dope, her funniest and frankest set to date. It examines addiction in all its forms, from social media to relationships to drugs, and relies for its success on her ability to bring comic effervescence to a heavy subject.

An Indiana Jones spoof and the destruction of Palmyra – the six best shows at Edinburgh fringe 2017

August 15, 2017TheGuardian

Six of the best from Edinburgh including Mat Ewins’ barrage of one-liners, a German teacher placement at a secondary school and a transgender journey

Pleasance Courtyard
Building on the success of her 2016 show about sexism in comedy, the no-nonsense Welshwoman delivers a lean and effective set about a year spent volunteering with vulnerable kids. It doesn’t sound funny, but it really is, thanks to her brusque wit and a high quotient of thoughtful, self-lacerating jokes. BL

John Robins review – painfully funny account of breaking up with Sara Pascoe

August 15, 2017TheGuardian

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh
The standup provides near-constant laughs in a startlingly honest, high-powered show that spares no one – least of all himself

Sara Pascoe: LadsLadsLads review – breakup tales from a woman reborn

Can things get any worse for John Robins? At Christmas, he was dumped by his partner of four years, Sara Pascoe. She’s now performing a hit Edinburgh show that’s candid to the point of cruelty about their breakup. I’d fear for the man’s wellbeing were his own show on the subject to be eclipsed by hers. Happy to report, then, that it’s every bit as good. Not only is Robins extremely forthright about his emotional wretchedness post-breakup, he’s also consistently, uproariously funny. The two moods don’t contradict, they complement – which is an impressive feat.

“My flatmate’s left,” is how he kickstarts this standup cri de cœur. The truth hurts, and Robins needs coping mechanisms: calling her “flatmate”, expressing his feelings in a chirpy cockney accent. The first half recounts his new life in “Grief Mansions”, staring, buying bad furniture (because he can) and itemising the trivial pros and crushing cons (“one-all!”) of no longer being Mr Pascoe. Recollecting that relationship’s petty frustrations, he paints a merciless picture of himself as a neurotic, socially maladroit manchild. “I would leave me too,” he announces, at the show’s emotional nadir.

Sara Schaefer: the breakout comic on trashing Trump and bombing on stage

August 15, 2017TheGuardian

After writing gigs on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, the American standup is heading for the big time via a show at the Edinburgh festival fringe

Losing control of your bladder in a grocery store. Being bullied at school for using men’s deodorant. Getting posture problems as a result of walking with a constant stoop to hide your flat chest. These and other harrowingly embarrassing tales are the stock-in-trade of Sara Schaefer, the latest potential US comedy superstar to head to the Edinburgh festival fringe. In recent years, Trevor Noah and Michael Che both played the fringe as near-unknowns before getting their current jobs at The Daily Show and SNL respectively. Schaefer could well be set for similarly great things.

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