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Edinburgh Comedy award shortlist includes Ahir Shah and Rose Matafeo

August 22, 2018TheGuardian

Felicity Ward, Alex Edelman, Glenn Moore, Larry Dean and Kieran Hodgson also among standups in the running for £10,000 main prize – but the list has some striking omissions

The shortlist has been announced for the 2018 Edinburgh Comedy award, and it’s the most traditional lineup the prize has seen for years. In what will be seen as a shortlist for standup purists, the Jewish American act Alex Edelman features with his show about gatecrashing a Nazi meeting, the terrific New Zealander Rose Matafeo gets her first (and overdue) nomination and, with the only show that’s not straight standup, Yorkshireman Kieran Hodgson is nominated for ’75, a storytelling show about the pre-history of Brexit.

Also included – and competing for a prize won last year by Hannah Gadsby’s Netflix phenomenon Nanette – are Ahir Shah (following up on his 2017 nod) with a set about visiting his deported Indian grandmother in the wake of the Windrush scandal, and the veteran Aussie comic Felicity Ward. Gags-man Glenn Moore makes a maiden appearance on the shortlist, and local hero Larry Dean, from Glasgow, is nominated for his breakup show Bampot after a Best Newcomer mention back in 2015.

Adam Rowe’s jobcentre joke crowned funniest of Edinburgh fringe

August 19, 2018TheGuardian

Liverpool comedian follows in footsteps of Ken Cheng and Tim Vine in winning award

Comedians often strive to find laughter through the tears, and the winner of this year’s funniest joke of the Edinburgh fringe is no exception.

Adam Rowe has taken home the accolade after riffing on the challenges of being sacked. “Working at the jobcentre has to be a tense job,” he pointed out to his audience. “Knowing that if you get fired, you still have to come in the next day.”

Adam Rowe’s jobcentre joke crowned funniest of Edinburgh fringe

August 19, 2018TheGuardian

Liverpool comedian follows in footsteps of Ken Cheng and Tim Vine in winning award

Comedians often strive to find laughter through the tears, and the winner of this year’s funniest joke of the Edinburgh fringe is no exception.

Adam Rowe has taken home the accolade after riffing on the challenges of being sacked. “Working at the jobcentre has to be a tense job,” he pointed out to his audience. “Knowing that if you get fired, you still have to come in the next day.”

‘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.

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