Jay Richardson

Stewart Francis hits the Stand

7 Jan 2010

Stewart Francis used to open his set with, ‘Don’t worry, I haven’t heard of you either.’ Between hosting schlocky gameshow You Bet Your Ass in his native Canada, then moving to Spain, his memorable one-liners were an itinerant treat on the UK circuit to…

Alex Horne - Wordwatching

7 Jan 2010

(Virgin Books) Alex Horne is a true logophile. He’s a lover of words, especially rare words, like ‘logophile’, that seldom make it into dictionaries. Or ‘bollo’, ‘pratdigger’ and ‘mental safari’, his own recent coinages that the comedian has been…

Scotland: An Eejit's Guide

9 Dec 2009

Less a reflection on its audience than a spoof of the sort of titles you’ll find in Waterstone’s clearance bins come January, Scotland: An Eejit’s Guide is a comedy homage to Caledonia from two of its most voluble amateur historians. Mixing grim…

Tim Minchin: Ready For This?

The Australian musical comedian returns to Scotland

1 Oct 2009

I’ve interviewed Tim Minchin several times, but never in the surprisingly big, hairy and hungover flesh before. ‘I’m totally comfortable on stage but I like to appear discomforted and vulnerable because it works with my material. I’m surprised how…

Dave Gorman back in the cycle of stand-up

3 Sep 2009

Dave Gorman rarely takes the easy route to a laugh. Having transformed the comedy landscape with his quest-based, storytelling shows, he’s back performing conventional stand-up. Except that he’s also currently cycling 50 miles a day between gigs as part…

Dave Gorman

A one-man innovative juggernaut going coast to coast

6 Aug 2009

Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack Adventure is ostensibly the story of a comedian travelling the world trying to establish disparate pairings of words that return just one hit in the search engine. ‘Essentially a show about me having a breakdown’, is how Gorman…

Jazz Hans

The highly strung Dutch star Hans Teeuwen has quit comedy back home to bamboozle UK audiences

6 Aug 2009

In Holland, Hans Teeuwen is such a legendary entertainment figure that grown men imitate his comedy routines to the point of driving their daughters mad. Or at least that’s the plot of Just Hans, a forthcoming Dutch film in which Teeuwen appears as a…

Clever Peter

Rude sketch troupe sticking eggs into the appropriate baskets

24 Jul 2009

Despite a widely praised debut, the thrusting chaps of sketch troupe Clever Peter are back at the Fringe with greater ambition, tighter writing and less sexual gratuity, if not crudity. Dental torture and primate anal rape are the abiding memories of…

Edward Aczel

Solving the world’s woes in a pleasingly shambolic way

24 Jul 2009

Having performed essentially the same critically-acclaimed non-show for the last two years, anti-comic Edward Aczel is planning something a little different for this Fringe, as he ambitiously Explains All the World’s Problems … And Then Solves Them.

Out of the bag - Dead Cat Bounce

They may have upset everyone at Mo Mowlam’s memorial gig but Dead Cat Bounce are now flying high

22 Jul 2009

If you’ve never actually met rock’n’roll sketch band Dead Cat Bounce, you could be forgiven for thinking that these guitar-wielding Dubliners occupy a place so far ahead of the curve that they’re on the outermost tip of the zeitgeist’s serrated edge.

Campaign manager - Mark Thomas

The comic who matters brings democracy to the Fringe

13 Jul 2009

The origins of the apocryphal Chinese curse ‘may you live in interesting times’ are obscure. But for comedian and activist Mark Thomas, political instability, economic meltdown and the imminent collapse of Western civilisation can occasionally feel like…

Frank Skinner - ‘I always try to take the piss out of myself’

The comedian on his second memoir, On the Road

13 Jul 2009

The List: How do book readings compare to performing stand-up? Frank Skinner: Well, I select a couple of bits from the book, read a bit and then get interviewed by whoever they’ve got to interview me. Then I read some more. But the ones I’ve done so…

Will Andrews

11 Jun 2009

Although he first tried stand-up as a 17-year-old in Newcastle, Zimbabwe-born Will Andrews established his comedic reputation in Scotland. Performing live as his alter-ego Tony Carter, a dole-sponging Geordie on a government retraining scheme, he…

Bethany Black

28 May 2009

As the UK’s foremost goth, lesbian, post-op transsexual stand-up, Bethany Black worries about being pigeonholed. So it’s a ‘recovering alcoholic, drug addict and love addict too’ who will be showcasing material from her forthcoming Fringe show this…

Holly Walsh

16 Apr 2009

A self-confessed ‘comedy nerd’, writer and long-term, long-suffering temp Holly Walsh only began performing stand-up in 2006, because ‘I was coming up with jokes that nobody else wanted but which I thought were really funny. Turns out they weren’t but…

Ross Noble - Things Change

19 Mar 2009

Despite just losing his farm in Australia to the recent bush fires and flying into the UK on the morning of this interview, Ross Noble maintains he’s completely primed for questioning. ‘Oh, wait, I’ve put too much pressure on myself,’ the Geordie comic…

Glasgow Comedy Festival - The Penny Dreadfuls

5 Mar 2009

Conspiring in the darkest bowels of BBC’s Henry Wood House in London, three earnest young men, exemplars of aggressive Victorian ambition, are hatching a dastardly, somewhat far-fetched plot to conquer Edinburgh this August. Beginning with sorties into…

Amy MacKinnon - Tethered

5 Feb 2009

PSYCHODRAMA The most remarkable aspect of Tethered, Amy MacKinnon’s debut novel about a mortician drawn into the hunt for a missing child, is that the central character, Clara, an isolated, damaged woman, who devotes herself to beautifying the dead…

Raymond Mearns

22 Jan 2009

STAND-UP If you’ve only witnessed Raymond Mearns on roistering compering duty, then you’ve barely experienced the burly Glaswegian’s skill with a well-spun anecdote. ‘I feel I can get a lot better if I get the opportunity to do longer sets,’ he says…

Woodlands Bumper Value Comedy Club

27 Nov 2008

NEW CLUB With parts of the Jongleurs’ chain under threat of sell-off, these are interesting times for comedy in Scotland. Even more so now with the growing number of smaller nights emerging to challenge the Stand-Jongleurs hegemony and spread the…

Dylan Moran

Good stock

30 Oct 2008

Despite the current economic doom and gloom, or more likely because of it, live comedy is booming, with a host of big names currently touring the UK. And while luminaries like the Mighty Boosh, Sarah Silverman, Steve Coogan and Lee Evans have recently…

Laura Dockrill - Mistakes in the Background

30 Oct 2008

The emergence of a sassy-tongued poet who can relate to the yoof should be a good thing. And Laura Dockrill, aka MC Dockers, truly does seem to be articulating, in her unaffected, unchecked, stream of consciousness way, the existence of the Facebook…

Jacques Chessex - The Vampire of Ropraz

2 Oct 2008

CRIME NOVELLA Taking a true story, apparently, Swiss author Jacques Chessex has crafted a disconcerting novella of horrific sexual crime that alternately seduces and appals. Set against a bleak 1903 backdrop of rural belief in black magic, the Jura…

Scottish Comedian of the Year

18 Sep 2008

STAND-UP COMPETITION Approaching its third anniversary, the Scottish Comedian of the Year final looms ever more influentially in the stand-up calendar. Inspired by Manchester’s City Life contest – won by the likes of Peter Kay, Chris Addison and…

Russell Howard

Beat surrender

14 Aug 2008

Russell Howard can't resist a spot of testicular tomfoolery but, he tells Jay Richardson, his new act is less Buster Gonad than Jack Kerouac With his infectious, wide-eyed optimism currently offering a counterbalance to Frankie Boyle's unflinching…