Reviews & features: Comedy, Paul Dale
The Silky Pair
22 Aug 2012
A few sketches hit the mark, but feels cobbled together
Female duo The Silky Pair sells sketches and songs from their comedy shop. Punters have the chance to buy complete routines including outfits and hand gestures. It's a conceptual comedy cliché that's as old as The Two Ronnies but that doesn't mean it…
I Am, I Am
15 Aug 2012
Highly entertaining slapstick minstrelry from promising troubadour comedy duo
For ones so young it's obscene how much confidence these duelling acoustic troubadours from Cambridge have. With their genre shifting ditties and punning rhymes I Am, I Am are most obviously comparable to The Flight of the Conchords but their very…
Jessie Cave: Bookworm
11 Aug 2012
A bookish, kooky, bolshy hour
Jessie Cave has a thing about books. She also has a thing about power. Founding a book club is a given. Giddy with excitement, Cave parades her many eccentricities while laying down the various rules of book club. Before becoming an actress (she played…
The Funeral of Conor O'Toole
11 Aug 2012
Compassionate comedy skirting with tedium
Fey, morbid and awkward Conor O’Toole is an unlikely comedian. A noted Goth, O’Toole wants to plan his own funeral and he is after an audience. He leads a curious bunch of punters from Bristo Square to Greyfriars Kirkyard, gets them to settle near some…
Ruby Wax: Losing It
19 Aug 2011
A fevered and empowering comic monologue
According to a 2009 report, one in ten people in Scotland take daily medication for depression. This demographic are Ruby Wax’s kind of people. Broadened out from a community project that Wax and best friend/musician Judith Owen toured around NHS mental…
Paul Foot: Still Life
16 Aug 2011
Childish ingenuity and some laughs but feels like going through the motions
Like Frankie Howerd before him, procrastination and performance deconstruction filtered through a mesh of silliness are Foot’s stock in trade. Despite previous Fringe prowess, Still Life has him going through the motions. There’s childish ingenuity and…
Danny Bevins
15 Aug 2011
Muscular comedy from the former soldier, jailbird and redneck
Former soldier, jailbird and dysfunctionally raised red neck, Bevins is a gifted and dyspeptic stand-up, stringing together material on the ancient theme that all humanity is excrement. Like a mildly less political Bill Hicks, Bevins likes to confound…
Carey Marx
12 Aug 2011
The thinking man’s shock jock
Middle-aged and feeling decrepit and pointless, Carey Marx believes in speaking his sordid little mind. Opinions on clitoral stimuli, fat people who stop suddenly in the street, feminists and circumcision-revenge-rabbi-rape spill easily from his…
Doctor Brown
8 Aug 2011
Silent and vulgar tedium
Surrealism and silent comedy have a long and healthy relationship. Ask Mack Sennett, Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton. You’d have to dig them up first, but that may be preferable to spending time with the hirsute Doctor Brown. In his silk dressing gown…
Colin Hoult
8 Aug 2011
Talented and energetic performer targets UK provinces
Somewhere between Angry Boys and The League of Gentlemen lies Colin Hoult. A clearly talented and energetic performer, Hoult’s bag is the grotesquery of the provinces. Crap Welsh poets, crime stoppers from East Midlands, gleeful northern dogs and…
Andrew Watts
18 Aug 2009
Without any decent jokes
Taking a rough show chronology from The Kinks’ 1968 single ‘David Watts’, posh butterball and depressed ex-lawyer Andrew Watts takes us on a journey through his arcane obsessions and observations. With his talk of macro-economics and pharmaceutical…
John Bishop
18 Aug 2009
Master of the familiar and familial anecdote
Liverpool FC-loving dad prevaricates on age, fatherhood, pornography, playing a lesbian’s father in Skins, Elvis’ death, and (indulgently) his personal journey to Anfield. Broad, culturally conservative but funny, there’s nothing surprising here, but…
Eco-friendly Jihad
7 Aug 2008
Saving the planet with fun
Irish columnist and comedian Abie Philbin Bowman, creator of Jesus: The Guantanamo Years, returns for a second coming. This time, he wants to save the world and like his famous father (Irish broadcaster and historian John Bowman) he believes that real…
Bethany Black
7 Aug 2008
Personal story told with little verve
You would think that a goth, lesbian, post-op transsexual might have a few interesting stories to tell? And Bethany Black does, but she doesn't know how to tell them. From an early age Black felt she was in the wrong body. By her twenties she was…
Pete Firman
7 Aug 2008
For a bit of straightforward, old-fashioned entertainment you can't go wrong with comedy magician Firman. With the giddy fakir style trickery skills of Tommy Cooper and the flirtatious warmth of Eric Morecambe, he's a northern crowd-pleasing wonder.
