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‘She’s got no filter’: the standup who let a six-year-old write his comedy show

August 3, 2018TheGuardian

Giving his partner’s daughter free rein during the creative process has resulted in Owen Roberts’ most surreal show to date – and the sort of laughs other comics at Edinburgh dream of

In a sweaty Portakabin in Edinburgh, a standup makes his entrance to Let It Go from Frozen. He is dressed as a chicken, complete with feather boa and yellow tights, and before long is clucking among the audience, dancing and laying eggs. This, explains standup Owen Roberts, is what happens when you let a six-year-old girl create your fringe comedy show.

The idea came to Roberts, who usually performs with the sketch trio Beasts, when he was trying to write his first solo material. After spending the day in front of a blank computer screen, he went to pick up his partner’s garrulous daughter, Isabella, from school. Isabella, he realised, was full of imagination and energy. Could she rescue him in this moment of desperation? After all, he helps her with her homework.

Strewth! Antipodean women deliver summer of laughter to Britain

July 29, 2018TheGuardian

Comics from Australia and New Zealand will take centre stage, from Netflix to the Edinburgh fringeAustralian comedians have traditionally provided British audiences with a slice of unabashed, earthy humour, dating back to the early heyday of Dame Edna …

Funny bones run in the family as fringe plays host to comic dynasties

July 14, 2018TheGuardian

This year’s Edinburgh festival features many young standups with parents – from Mark Steel to Gyles Brandreth – who blazed the same trail

Among the many voices booming out across comedy venues next month during Edinburgh’s fringe festival, several will sound strangely familiar. It might be the accent, the style of delivery or even the pace of the joke-telling that eventually gives away the identity of these performers.

The sons and daughters of some of the country’s best-known comedians are establishing themselves in their own right on the festival scene. And this Edinburgh will see stronger evidence than ever of a growing stream of second-generation talent.

My sense of humour was born out of my mother’s vocal gymnastics and my dad’s desire to needle people

Edinburgh fringe 2018 to tackle #MeToo and celebrate Blue Peter

June 6, 2018TheGuardian

Lineup for 71st edition includes hard-hitting debuts and plenty of nostalgia

An array of provocative debuts will mix with a heavy dose of nostalgia at the 71st Edinburgh fringe festival this August, as creative takes on the #MeToo movement are performed alongside a theatrical tribute to Blue Peter, the world’s longest-running children’s TV show.

Launching the 2018 fringe programme with 3,548 shows, the most in its history, the event’s chief executive, Shona McCarthy, said: “Whether this is your first or your 50th time visiting the fringe as a performer or audience member, this is a place where new discoveries wait around every corner.”

A date with the devil: Reece Shearsmith reveals source of his inspiration

April 8, 2018TheGuardian

As The League of Gentlemen prepare a UK tour, the co-creator of the dark comedy describes how a 1920s Swedish horror film ignited his love of black humour

A journey into the black heart of the imagination of Reece Shearsmith is not a trip for the fainthearted. But that is what is on offer this month when Shearsmith presents his favourite silent film to an audience in a Birmingham town hall, before a much-anticipated League of Gentlemen reunion tour of Britain in August and September.

Häxan, or The Witch, is a Swedish chiller from 1922. Its grainy images have fed Shearsmith’s nightmares since he saw it as a teenager late one night at home. “I must have watched it on telly at around 13,” he said. “It is genuinely unsettling and startling because the effects are really good.”

We want to make telly that makes you attentive. You can’t let our comedy just wash over you.

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

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.

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.

Sir Ken Dodd obituary

March 12, 2018TheGuardian

Comedian with an endless desire to make people laugh known for his tickling sticks, Diddymen and marathon stage performances

The last great “front-cloth” comic of our times, and the last standing true vaudevillian, Ken Dodd, who has died aged 90, was even more than that – a force of nature, a whirlwind, an ambulant torrent of surreal invention, physical and verbal, whose Liverpudlian cheek masked the melancholy of an authentic clown. “This isn’t television, missus,” he’d say to the front stalls, “you can’t turn me off.” And then he would embark on an odyssey of gag-spinning that, over five hours, would beat an audience into submission, often literally, banging a huge drum and declaring that if we did not like the jokes he would follow us home and shout them through the letter-box.

He entered the Guinness Book of Records in 1974 with a marathon mirth-quake at the Royal Court Liverpool lasting three hours, 30 minutes and six seconds. But his solo shows, in which he would perform three 90-minute-plus sets between magic acts, or a female trumpeter (the formidable Joan Hinde), or a pianist playing country music (his partner Anne Jones), frequently lasted much longer. One good thing, he would say, was that you always went home in the daylight. “And the sooner you laugh at the jokes,” he would say, “the sooner you can go home,” as if we were in school. He admitted that his was an educational show – when you did get home you would think: “That taught me a lesson!”

Five times comedy legend Ken Dodd made us laugh – video

March 12, 2018TheGuardian

The entertainer Sir Ken Dodd has died at the age of 90, just two days after marrying his long-term partner, Anne Jones. Dodd died on Sunday in the house in which he was born, in the Liverpool suburb of Knotty Ash. His publicist, Robert Holmes…

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