The comedian, writer and blogger on what makes him laugh the mostWatching Billy Connolly at the Hammersmith Apollo in the late 90s was a masterclass of long-form comedy. I also shared a hotel lift with him at the Montreal festival and he was funnier in…
Continue ReadingCity Varieties Music Hall, Leeds
The broadcaster’s first standup tour, Cradle to the Stage, is a lucky-dip of nostalgic childhood stories and showbiz anecdotes
You’ve read the autobiography. You’ve seen the sitcom. Now here’s the solo stage show of Danny Baker’s life – or at least, the bits of it he can squeeze into its two-hour duration. It’s billed as a “first ever standup tour” but really, it’s just one story after another from a man with an inexhaustible capacity for gossip and anecdotage. “There’s no script,” he says, then later: “I’m pretty good company, but that’s all this is.”
I’m not about to contradict him: Cradle to the Stage is less a show than a lucky dip into the grab-bag of Baker’s storied past. Having spurned his mate Jimmy Carr’s suggestion to preview it, he now jokes with his off-stage technician that he hasn’t rehearsed the show either. Act One ends abruptly at the behest of a downstage stopwatch, when – to Baker’s dismay – we’re only 15 years into his life story. From then on, he keeps alluding to all the great material he failed to cover in the first half.
Related: Danny Baker: ‘People assume I must be hiding some dark secret’
Continue ReadingEvery day millions of internet users ask Google life’s most difficult questions, big and small. Our writers answer some of the commonest queries
We live in a time of profound change and challenge and even though we think we know it all, there are still some big existential questions that plague mankind. And I do mean man.
Related: More women on comedy panel shows? Sure – if you’re posh or pretty | Fern Brady
Having a fanny isn’t a barrier to being funny
Related: Study of UK comedy panel shows finds just one all-female episode
Continue ReadingAn alternative style of artist management is helping talents such as James Acaster and Dane Baptiste take a long-game approach. Rule No 1? Be nice
Back in the 1990s, when club comics such as Frank Skinner, Jack Dee and Lee Evans were becoming household names thanks to the “comedy boom”, being a comedy agent was often a cutthroat business, fighting for the few opportunities on TV and radio. But with the rise of panel shows and streaming services, and the alternative scene moving more into the mainstream, a new school of agents are adopting fresh approaches to ensure their clients stand out. And forget bullishness – one of those tactics is to be nice.
“Being in competition with other agents is now a very dated concept,” says David Geli, co-director of comedy agency UTC Artist Management. “It needs to be collaborative. Everyone’s in this industry together and they’ve got to work together.” Geli, a former cameraman, set up the company with Polly McGirr, a TV producer. Bored of seeing the same old comedy faces on television, they started running an open mic gig at Greenwich’s Up the Creek club, as a means to see new acts. Neither, they tell me when we meet near their Peckham offices, had any desire to be a manager. But one act changed their minds.
All you need to do is write a brilliant show, be as funny as you can and turn up on time – we’ll do the rest
Related: Où est le punchline? The art of standup in a second language
Continue ReadingThe Drifters star on the things that make him laugh the mostProbably Daniel Kitson. But I remember crying with laughter the first time I saw Phil Nichol and, most recently, Colin Hoult as Anna Mann, too. Continue reading…
Continue ReadingSoho theatre, London
The Iranian-born comic, marking 40 years since her arrival in the UK, makes a compelling argument for the multifaceted nature of nationhood
The first 10 minutes of Shappi Khorsandi’s current show are the most intriguing – perhaps because they’re not really its first 10 minutes at all. Khorsandi debuted Oh My Country! From Morris Dancing to Morrissey on last year’s Edinburgh fringe, where it certainly wouldn’t have included a precis of her recent withdrawal from the longlist for the inaugural Jhalak book prize, exclusively for writers of colour. She begins tonight’s set by addressing that experience, in a raw section that contains a few good jokes (“Writer of colour? It makes me sound like a crayon”) and the potential for more, and more considered, commentary – in her next show, perhaps.
It’s the thorniness of that issue, and Khorsandi’s volatile feelings about it, that contrast with the rest of her set – a likable but comparatively uncontentious (to a London audience, at least) account of Khorsandi’s relationship with her Englishness. Having migrated here as an infant, the Iranian-born comic now considers herself English, and has little patience with anyone who disagrees. To those who say, “You weren’t born here,” she replies: “Neither was tea.” To those arguing for a genetic Englishness, she asserts that there’s really no such thing.
Related: Shappi Khorsandi: ‘I had a dream Donald Trump got a lead role in Hamilton’
Continue ReadingAs suppers are held for Robert Burns’ birthday, here’s a toast to the standups of Scotland whose attitudes and accents are perfectly suited to comedy
When I saw Scottish standup Scott Gibson last summer, his show felt as if it was extra funny purely because Gibson is Glaswegian. As if you get free comedy points – or even better, free laughs – for being from a certain part of the world. When I put this to Gibson himself, he hesitantly agreed. “I’m glad this is the accent I’ve got,” he said. “I love being from Glasgow. There’s a harshness. From a young age, we always slag each other [off]. I don’t know if we’re just quick on the retort. And storytelling’s always been in our blood. I certainly wouldn’t want to be from anywhere else.”
In the same interview, though, Gibson discussed Scottish comedians’ timidity – their sense of inferiority to “London, the establishment, whatever”; their sense that the Edinburgh fringe isn’t for them. Such is the Scots’ “cultural cringe”, much discussed north of the border, the Hyde of shame to the Dr Jekyll of pride that Gibson expressed in his city’s comic culture. It’s Burns Night tonight, which seemed like a good occasion to explore whether (in the year after Scottish comedians walked off with Edinburgh’s two major comedy awards for the first time) there is any such thing as an identifiable Scottish brand of comedy.
Related: Laugh? I nearly died: how an aneurysm led Scott Gibson to standup
Related: Laughing gear: the best live comedy to start 2017
Continue ReadingCorn Exchange, Cambridge
The foppish comedian is a terrific performer but his tightly scripted comedy doesn’t compensate for the dearth of anything real or insightful to say
‘God, these stories are so relatable,” Jack Whitehall jokes while telling us the one about meeting Prince Harry at the Royal Variety Performance, or the one about trying to “break America”. A concern to stay relatable is notable throughout this new live show, in which the standup prodigy strains to appear just like you and me. As ever, there are plenty of jokes about his poshness. But they’re outnumbered by demotic routines about Greggs the bakers, stealing from hotels and going on stag parties. A show more flagrantly designed for a popular audience’s approval, it would be hard to imagine.
Which is fine – so long as you’re not looking for novelty, or a tincture of truth behind Whitehall’s efficiently funny but wholly unconvincing autobiographical gags. At one point, he feigns embarrassment at calling a spliff a “weedypuff”, as if he’s accidentally let slip how uncool he is. Later, he tells a story about competing with Idris Elba for the role of Nelson Mandela, while another yarn distils the desolation of his enforced stay at Disneyland into a vignette about asking Mickey Mouse to activate the porn channels on his hotel TV.
Continue ReadingThe superstar standup on what makes him laugh the most I, Partridge: We Need To Talk About Alan. Nomad is also pretty incredible. I listened to the audiobook on a beach in Mexico recently and, during the bit about Sherlock Holmes, people were looking a…
Continue ReadingLeicester Square theatre, London
The US standup star covers his love of junk food and his fear of doctors in a self-mocking set that shows off his voice as a well-tuned comic instrument
Good, clean, family comedy. That’s what US audiences have come to expect from Jim Gaffigan, who is a big deal Stateside, with his own autobiographical sitcom, a new special due on Netflix, and a plum recent gig opening for the Pope. So is this America’s Michael McIntyre? There are certainly similarities, as Gaffigan riffs on airport security, his wife’s taste for uncomfortable shoes, and life as a father of five. But there’s a gruffer edge to the humour, from a comic who’s bluer around the collar than McIntyre and who wouldn’t be seen dead skipping on stage, or anywhere else.
His jokes aren’t going to frighten the horses – the only Donald Trump lines all evening, for example, come from his excellent support act Ted Alexandro, who quips drolly about “our 45th and final president”. Gaffigan keeps things more domestic, opening with routines about going to the gym – well-charted comic territory – and his fear of doctors. The latter builds to a delightful climax in which Gaffigan is consulting his GP by proxy through the medium of his sick child.
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