fri 11/07/2025

Comedy

Edinburgh Fringe 2015: Aisling Bea/ Funz and Gamez/ Chris Stokes

Aisling Bea, Gilded Balloon ★★★★Aisling Bea received an Edinburgh Comedy Awards best newcomer nomination for her excellent show in 2013, and she returns with another high-energy hour of clowning about and rapid-fire delivery mixed with some astute...

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Edinburgh Fringe 2015: Tom Allen/ Sarah Callaghan/ BEASTS

Tom Allen, The Stand ★★★★Tom Allen tells us Both Worlds is about being gay, watching daytime TV, doing the gardening and his  "crushing sense of wasting his life". But this is no misery comedy, far from it, as Allen gives us an hour of...

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Edinburgh Fringe 2015: Katherine Ryan/ Adrienne Truscott/ Gein's Family Giftshop

Katherine Ryan, The Stand ★★★★ "TV's Katherine Ryan," she introduces herself with heavy irony; the Canadian has gone from Fringe performer to never off the telly in just a few years and knows that the sobriquet can be both a compliment and a...

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Edinburgh Fringe 2015: Bridget Christie/ Mark Steel/ Beth Vyse

Bridget Christie, The Stand ★★★★Bridget Christie, the comic credited with bringing feminism to the fore with her 2013 Edinburgh Comedy Awards-winning show, broadens her target for withering political analysis and to great effect.In A Book For Her (...

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Rob Delaney, QEH

Most people in the UK will know US comic Rob Delaney from his wonderfully sardonic Twitter feed (1.17 million followers) or his autobiography Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage - a painfully honest (and often...

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Tommy Tiernan, Soho Theatre

Tommy Tiernan tells us not to take him seriously at the start of his latest show, Out of the Whirlwind. “I’m like a cow mooing for the sake of mooing,” he says – which neatly explains the surreal riffs in a mesmerising 80 minutes, but also lets him...

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Nina Conti, Theatre Royal, Brighton

“Two-and-a-half hours? That’s one hell of a long puppet show,” said a friend. We had, however, read the Brighton Festival programme wrong. The pre-interval section of last night’s show was a screening of the BBC documentary Nina Conti – A...

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Alex Horne: Monsieur Butterfly, Soho Theatre

There are many forms of comedy – stand-up, sketch and improv among them – and now Alex Horne has introduced a new genre as he constructs his set during the hour he spends on stage. It's a kind of Heath Robinson or Rube Goldberg device (that is, a...

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Panti: High Heels in Low Places, Soho Theatre

Panti Bliss is not a name on many people's lips outside Ireland, but over the past year she has gone from little-known club performer to self-described “accidental activist”, and this utterly charming, funny and touching show tells her story.Panti (...

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James Freedman: Man of Steal, Menier Chocolate Factory

Normally comedy critics tell people not to sit in the front row, lest they're picked on by a particularly boorish comic. No such problem for audiences at James Freedman's interesting and unusual show about the art of pickpocketing and more modern...

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The Pub Landlord, Touring

Al Murray is celebrating 20 years as his brilliant invention the Pub Landlord, an autodidact, xenophobic sexist with misogynistic undertones. Who better then, you may think, to run for a certain political party in the forthcoming election? You'd be...

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Nina Conti Clowning Around, BBC Four

Ventriloquist Nina Conti, along with her wisecracking sidekick Monkey, has emerged as one of the sharper comedy acts of the past few years but Nina Conti Clowning Around was an uneasy, far from comic film. Embarking on a new direction, away from “...

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