wed 10/09/2025

Comedy

Show Me the Funny Live, touring

The people behind ITV's Show Me the Funny – a sort of X Factor for comics – have, as part of the prize for those who reached last month's final, launched a short UK tour for its winner, Patrick Monahan, and the two runners-up, Tiffany Stevenson...

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Alan Carr, touring

It has been four years since Alan Carr toured with a live show, and he's been much missed from the circuit. From his first appearances at the Edinburgh Fringe when he entertained audiences with tales of his past life as a call-centre worker and...

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Lee Evans, Wembley Arena

Not everyone likes Lee Evans and his bespoke brand of simian gurning and jerky rubberised motion. But he is very much to the taste of a majority of the comedy-going classes. Few other stand-ups – you can count them on one hand – could spend a season...

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Stephen Merchant, Reading Hexagon

Stephen Merchant has played the sleeping partner for so long in his professional relationship with Ricky Gervais that it was perhaps inevitable he would address the issue at the top of the show. The good thing about going on tour, apart from meeting...

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theartsdesk Q&A: Comedian Lee Evans

'I'm a stand-up. That's what I do': Lee Evans goes back to the day job

Lee Evans (b 1964) has been doing his brand of unruly physical comedy on stage since his teens. In recent years, however, he has laid to rest the perception, held since he won the Perrier at Edinburgh in 1993, that he is an effing and blinding...

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Comedy

Comedy (formerly merged with Theatre). Hub Veronica (quota in cahoots with Matt\, theatre - 20 rvus\, 3 feats p mth for T&C)

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About The Arts Desk

The Arts Desk, or theartsdesk.com, is a website created in 2009 by leading British professional arts journalists and critics to offset the decline in supply of arts coverage in the print media where most of them worked. Launched on 9 September 2009...

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Q&A/Gallery: Photographer Rich Hardcastle

From Edinburgh to London and back, via Tatooine and Port Talbot, Rich Hardcastle has photographed playwrights and magicians, burlesque dancers and rugby captains, and regularly adorned the covers of The Big Issue, FHM and The Sunday Times Culture...

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Outnumbered, Series Four, BBC One

From the long shot of the suburban London semis onwards, I couldn’t help but think of the 1960s BBC sitcom Not in Front of the Children which similarly focused on a middle-class couple with three children. There’s no laughter track on Outnumbered...

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Edinburgh Comedy Awards winners

The winners of the 2011 Foster's Edinburgh Comedy Awards have been announced. The main award, worth £10,000, went to Adam Riches for his anarchic and intensely physical show Bring Me the Head of Adam Riches; the best newcomer award, worth £5,000,...

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Edinburgh Fringe: Andrew Maxwell/ Hannibal Buress/ Cariad Lloyd

It's typically intelligent and insightful stuff from the Irishman, who describes himself simply as a clown - but he's a clown with the requisite political knowledge and understanding of the human condition to make some pretty astute observations...

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Edinburgh Fringe: Josie Long/ Josh Widdicombe

Josie Long: her political material would embarrass the average six-year-old

Last year, Josie Long, famous for her whimsical comedy and fey delivery, decided to get serious. Disheartened by the election result, she started to do political comedy, but sadly her level of analysis was along the lines of: “Anyone who voted...

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