“I’m not emotionally secure enough to do this”

July 26th, 2008 • comedy, improvisation

fringe comedy picks

June 19th, 2008 • comedy

Two recommendations for comedy at the Edinburgh Fringe festival:

1. Firmly at the top of my list is the Pajama Men - Shenoah Allen and Mark Chavez - who are back at the Fringe after a year’s break. Go and see them.

I first saw them in the aircraft-hangar of the George Square Theatre back in 2004 when they went by the name of SABOTAGE!, reviewed them and have regretted not giving them 5 stars instead of 4 ever since (yes, wrong venue, but should have forgiven them for that). I hopefully made up for it by taking friend after friend to see Stop Not Going in the Pleasance Courtyard, their 2005 show which won them the Fairtrade Dubble (double? geddit? LOLZ?) Act Award.

Their shows make me grin like an idiot and have sent me away feeling happier about comedy, the fringe and the universe in general. Like many stand-out shows, it’s hard to describe what they do without selling them short: think happily hallucinatory narrative-sketch comedy performed by men in night-wear. They’ve produced the cleverest, funniest material I’ve seen at the fringe, which both sounds like horribly effusive praise and happens to be true. And yes, I dropped the effusive-bomb.

Versus vs. Versus:

“Romance, mystery, and questionably accurate historical references”
Assembly Rooms, George Street: 31st July - 21st August

Book at edfringe.com
Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/pajamamen

2. An entirely fictitious wise man of comedy once said that there is only one thing you can do after you’ve spent a fringe pretending to be Johnson and Boswell - i.e. spend the following fringe as Queen Elizabeth and Walter Raleigh. Luckily, this is exactly the opportunity that Stewart Lee’s new comedy provides for Miles Jupp and Simon Munnery.

As a vanishing small claim to fame, I knew Miles through Improverts even before he was an inventor who lived in a pink castle. Now that’s celebrity.

Elizabeth and Raleigh - Late But Live:

“Though I have the body of a woman, I have the heart and stomach of a king, the brain of a dolphin, and the penis of a hippopotamus. All I need now is some glue.”
Underbelly Pasture, George Square: 31st July - 25th August

Book at edfringe.com

reading (without) comprehension

May 28th, 2008 • comedy, improvisation

A brief twitch before my brain caught up:

If, like me, you’ve been to all previous 10 years of the Chicago Improv Festival, you might have been wondering what happened to the annual April confab of spontaneously funny people. Isn’t it now almost June?

Well, this year the writers’ strike got in the way.

That’s the recognition that a number of very talented comedy writers are also talented improvisers (or the other way around, if you like) not the inadvertent admission that improvisers need scripts. : )

I’d be interested to find out if the change of month is a permanent decision or if the festival will switch back next year, fresh strike notwithstanding. Incidentally, where was I in April when the improv festival wasn’t happening? Chicago. Where am I now? Safely back in Scotland. Now that’s timing.

comedies win prizes

May 26th, 2008 • comedy

Great news: Aeneas Faversham Forever has just been crowned Best Comedy Show at the Brighton Festival Awards. Congratulations to Thom, Dave, Humphrey, Idil and Neil.

Work has me (happily) pinned down in Scotland, so I’ve been an absentee producer for far too many months this year - but the show’s in great shape and that there’s even more to come before the Fringe. Hurrah, etc.

reviews for aeneas faversham forever

March 17th, 2008 • comedy, penny dreadfuls

A quick round-up of the reviews for last week’s premiere of Aeneas Faversham Forever. First, the Edinburgh Evening News:

RETURNING to Edinburgh after a successful stint on Radio 7, The Penny Dreadfuls triumphantly premiered their new show to a sold-out, hysterical house. Now a trio, the team decided to revisit the site of their inception to reinvent themselves, abandoning the sketch-show format in favour of a full blown play. [...] While it might seem churlish to award only four stars to such a funny piece, there’s no question that it should walk effortlessly away with the full five when it returns for a full Fringe run.

Nice. I think the word is “gushing.” Read more »

metaLOL (or, I am really very hard at work)

February 20th, 2008 • comedy, research

There’s something wonderful about an entry in Wikipedia explaining a LOLcat image in which a cat is - in turn - explaining that he’s editing an entry in Wikipedia.