Comedy and Reviews

Nude

Non-gratuitous meanderings for art’s sake

21 Aug 2008

Don’t worry, there is no gratuitous nudity in Nude, just two actors flexing and posing their naked bodies in close proximity to the front row. But it’s all done in the name of art, and the context of a life drawing class, in which the reluctant audience…

Lucy Porter

A set down to its bare bones

14 Aug 2008

While it may have been slightly dispiriting for Lucy Porter to hop out on stage to a less than packed auditorium, there's little in her jovial demeanour to suggest crushed hopes. To spend an hour in Porter's company is akin to having a litre of Jelly…

Kung Fu Panda

3 Jul 2008

COMEDY/ANIMATION (PG) 91min In the words of Carl Douglas’ 1974 disco hit: ‘Everybody is kung fu fighting.’ Everybody, that is, apart from overweight panda Po (voiced by Jack Black). He dreams about joining his heroes, the Fierce Five, in butt-kicking…

A Fantastic Fear of Everything

Crispian Mills' directorial debut starts well but quickly loses pace

11 May 2012

A film by the former lead singer of Kula Shaker might not sound an appetising prospect. But before dismissing A Fantastic Fear of Everything, we should remember that Crispian Mills’ film pedigree is pretty spot-on. He is, after all, the son of Hayley…

Births, Deaths and Marriages

New radio sitcom from Alan Partridge regular David Schneider

22 May 2012

The old triumvirate of hatch, match and dispatch will surely prove fertile for the big comedic brain of David Schneider as he launches his new radio sitcom. Set in a Local Register Office, chief registrar Malcolm Fox (not Ian Rankin’s post-Rebus…

Sara Pascoe

Disappointing debut from Freud-studying comic

24 Aug 2010

Given that she’s performing her debut solo Fringe hour, the fact that Sara Pascoe is directing two other shows by more experienced comics might have gone a little to her head. Then again, this show is entitled Sara Pascoe vs Her Ego, and judging by the…

The Boat That Rocked

2 Apr 2009

COMEDY/DRAMA Richard Curtis’ return to the big screen after six years back working in television is not as rockin’ as it is rolling, loose, baggy and freewheeling. It feels like a very long musical montage with little structure or direction. Some…

My Best Friend’s Girl

13 Nov 2008

(15) 99min From Howard Deutch, the auteur behind the seminal teen movie Pretty in Pink starring Molly Ringwald, My Best Friend’s Girl is a 1980s throwback rom-com, updated with scatological language. Dane Cook, so disagreeable in last year’s Good…

Dark Shadows

A fun, if forgettable vampire movie, starring Johnny Depp, Eva Green and Michelle Pfeiffer

10 May 2012

Like a kid who turns up late to a Halloween party, Tim Burton arrives with his latest, vampire movie Dark Shadows. After Twilight, 30 Days of Night and Let The Right One In, not to mention TV’s True Blood…aren’t fangs, dusty coffins and dissolving in…

Moonrise Kingdom

Wes Anderson's latest echoes his earlier triumphs, but breaks no new ground

17 May 2012

Wes Anderson’s seventh film feels like a Greatest Hits package. Which if you’re a Wes fan will make you very happy. Set on a New England island in the summer of 1965, the opening sequence of Moonrise Kingdom, with its incessant camera-pans around the…

Project X

Major league mayhem with a dark, twisted edge

1 Mar 2012

(18) 88mins Animal House meets The Blair Witch Project, only this time the horror is very real in a movie that will undoubtedly give all parents nightmares. No, this is not a film about paranormal activity, but a high school party that gets…

Passenger Side is a witty road movie about sibling rivalries

Matt Bissonnette's comedy stars Joel Bissonnette and Adam Scott

28 Mar 2011

(12A) 85min Before the road movie was carjacked by the American gross-out comedy, Easy Rider and its offspring helped establish a genre of American outsider cinema, with its portraits of the big country beyond the confines of the Hollywood system.

Ashley Hames

The queasy confessions of a sex reporter

10 Aug 2009

At the top of the show, journalist and TV presenter Ashley Hames (possibly best known as the News Bunny on Live TV!) warns that he’s not a stand-up comedian; certainly his command of the script and PowerPoint presentation is endearingly shambling in…

What To Expect When You’re Expecting

A witless and bland work based on the pregnancy self-help book

23 May 2012

‘You don’t know what love is until you’ve wiped someone’s ass,’ offers one of the many baby-boomers in Kirk (Waking Ned, Everybody’s Fine) Jones’ multi-stranded adaptation of the bestselling self-help book about the dos and don’ts of pregnancy.

21 Jump Street

Deceptively smart big screen revival of the once popular TV show, with Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill

12 Mar 2012

(15)109min Taken at face value, 21 Jump Street is another mis-matched buddy cop outing that mixes elements from the original television series, Superbad coming-of-age values and the gung-ho rhetoric of Michael Bay's action movies. But there's a…

Comedy DVDs round up - The best and worst

The verdict on DVDs from Richard Herring, Greg Giraldo, Tommy Tiernan and Kevin Bridges

23 Dec 2010

The former Popworld and Never Mind the Buzzcocks host proves that behind the barbed sarcasm, he’s a vulnerable little soul. Over the course of 80 minutes, he chats about his inability to find a good man and his oddball family. A tortured Jewish lad…

Jon Richardson

Fewer laughs per hour than previous years

16 Aug 2010

Richardson’s trademark affable angst spills over into common or garden griping and moaning here (small talk, optimists and sex addicts all incur his wrath), with fewer laughs per hour than previous years. Perhaps the grumpy card has been played to…

Kevin Bridges

SECC, Glasgow, 28 May 2010

3 Jun 2010

Kevin Bridges is Glasgow banter personified. Going to see his live act is akin to getting excellent chat from a local at a wee old man’s pub. The type of pub you can get a whisky and mixer for £1.20. The unusual thing about tonight is that he’s not at a…

House of Windsor

Regal sketches with crowning glories to come

9 Aug 2007

With last year’s debut as the Future, Jonny Sweet and Joe Thomas received some rave reviews and an awards nomination before ending the summer being ensnared by one of the country’s powerhouse comedy PR companies. This year that soaring promise will…

Isy Suttie

9 Aug 2007

Initially, on reading that Isy Suttie was once a Daily Telegraph Young Jazz Competition regional winner, I thought it might have been a joke. Yet, on hearing her impersonation of Amy Winehouse falling down a well, allied to her general ability to get a…

All in Good Time

Sweet-natured culture clash comedy starring Amara Karan and Meera Syal

17 Apr 2012

(12A) 93min Originally a 1965 play and subsequently a film by Irish writer Bill Naughton, this sweet-natured comedy became a theatre hit again in 2007 when East is East writer Ayub Khan-Din adapted it into a present-day British-Asian setting. The…

The Midnight Beast - Book At Us Now

Unfunny pop-parody book designed to cash in on upcoming TV fame

18 Oct 2011

(Coronet) ‘We mock the living hell out of stuff for a living,’ claim London pop parody trio The Midnight Beast. Even in this disposable age, simply poking fun at more talented people can only stretch so far before the game is up. Success rarely…

Daniel Sloss - The Joker

Ridiculously talented young comedy buck

12 Aug 2011

Daniel Sloss – a charming, elongated Macaulay Culkin doppelganger, and protégé of Frankie Boyle – begins by listing the reasons why people might not like his show. ‘I smile, I swear, I’m happy and I can jump. The ones who won’t like me, they’re the old…

Israeli-Palestinian Conflict - A Romantic Comedy!

Israel and Palestine get it on

18 Aug 2010

MTV meets Middle East politics in this bouncy if disjointed musical offering from Nerdcore Rising director Negin Farsad and Mike Mosallam, where diplomacy is a euphemism for “boning”, rap becomes a weapon of war and Kurt Cobain emerges as a love rival…

Charlyne Yi

Don’t believe the hype

15 Aug 2010

The Assembly Rooms like their north American female comics to be a bit kooky. Maria Bamford and Kristen Schaal have mined an offbeat seam to glory at this venue over the last few years, but Charlyne Yi doesn’t quite have what it takes to follow fully in…