menu
Comedy

BRIGHTON COMEDY FESTIVAL

Kat Pope October 21, 2013

One of the joys of being a reviewer is that you get to see things that you’d normally never, ever put your hand in your pocket to see. Thus, your preconceived views are quite often turned on their head.

This last week, trotting off every night to the 12th annual BRIGHTON COMEDY FESTIVAL, I’ve loved things I thought I was going to hate and hated (well, ‘meh’-ed) at things I thought I was going to love.

 

THE OTHER WIDDICOMBE

(Josh Widdicombe in Incidentally…… at the Corn Exchange, Brighton – October 17 2013)

Three Stars

josh-widdicombe-2521196

Take JOSH WIDDICOMBE. On The Last Leg and Mock the Week he’s an adorable mop-top with a nice line in fake disgust. He’s difficult to dislike, and yet I came out of his Corn Exchange gig distinctly underwhelmed.

It was a pleasant enough set, based loosely around a collection of objects that he’d found on his coffee table on one day in April this year, when his dad had glanced at them and said “So that’s what your life’s like, is it?”, but he never quite managed to rev it up to anything with a bit of oomph.

Ranging from why Pizza Hut changed the wrong part of its name, to the impossibility of picking up a CD from a laminate floor, his comedy world is an insular, homely one, with his set culminating in a spot of audience participation involving some Love Hearts and how their messages seem less innocent these days.

Part of the problem is his voice. He was in particularly wheezy and phlegmy form that night and I wondered if he really is the chain smoker his throat seems to think he is. But perhaps the poor geezer just had a cold and I’m being my usual mean self.

But cold or not, he has a shrill delivery, with every mock outrage being less spat out, more spun into a tight ball of “I don’t beliiiieeeeve it” and launched into the stratosphere. His voice goes up and up and up, mostly ending in a self-deprecating smile which makes you forgive some of the surprisingly lazy jokes he comes out with (although most hit the mark with a soft thud).

It’s the likeability factor that gets Widdicombe through really. He’s more a gentle joker than a killer punsmasher. Or, more aptly, he’s a ‘josher’ as he himself points out. Josh-er. Geddit? Yes, well….

 

PAPPY’S GOT A BRAND NEW BAG ding a ling a ling a ling….bah

(Papy’s Last. Show. Ever at the Corn Exchange, Brighton – October 17 2013)

Five Stars and another one for luck

Lips

Well, that’s what I’ve been humming to myself since I was scarred for life by Brighton’s own comedy threesome Pappy’s.

I am ashamed to say that I’ve only ever caught this venerable (now) trio in snatches on the telly and have consistently hated their guts. Having just this moment caught up with some Badult clips, I’d say I still hate their guts. The rule ‘If it’s on BBC3 then it must be crap’ still seems to hold water I’m afraid.

But Pappy’s Last. Show. Ever is a wonderous thing to behold, to experience, to join in with, to digest, to eat with chopsticks, to smother in sun cream and rub all over your cat. I was, to be frank, bowled over by this lot of loons.

It took ten minutes of madcappery for me to be seduced. There I was, sitting in the front row, notebook in hand (yes, it was, in hindsight, a tremendously bad idea), being picked on by a large bald pop-eyed man, a Richard Herring lookalike, and a small, rather intense Jew. I was frightened, a rictus grin fixed on my face. Ha ha ha, I went. Ha ha ha gulp.

It’s nice to see a sketch show with a framework and Pappy’s was ingenious. The three comedians are now old geezers, reminiscing about what went so wrong that this turned out to be their Last. Show. Ever. Why did the group split up? Could it be that they all chose to do different things? Go their own ways? Or was it just basically a fuck up? (Have an educated guess).

Effortlessly clever and sophisticated yet puerile comedy followed, involving the world’s most incompetent censor, a game show called ‘I Can’t Do That’, the pecking order of cats, firemen and trees, a large orange dildo, logic loops, and, of course, a werepriest.

To call Ben, Matthew and Tom‘s act silly would be…..well, describing it really. But the quality of the comedy ideas shone through, as well as the fantastically energetic performances. A two minute scene where a whole relationship is played out on fast forward with help from a member of the audience is just genius, as are the scenes with The Wizard of Oz characters, all based around the Scarecrow being the odd man out.

I loved this show. It was stupid in the best sense of the word. And so was I to think I could get away with blending in….

SIMON MUNNERY IN A NUNNERY

(Simon Munnery in Flym at The Old Market, Hove – October 18 2013)

Four Stars

Simon-Munnery

The only thing I knew before approaching Simon Munnery‘s show Flym at The Old Market in Hove, was that he’s considered by many to be one of the comedy gods who got away.

He seems to have been around for ever and influenced a whole generation of successful comedians but never quite reached a wider audience himself, and it’s actually easy to see why.

At the start of the show a shambling Munnery takes to the stage to explain what’s going to happen. He’s going to go off stage and sit in the middle of the audience and talk into a camera and his face will be projected onto the large screen actually on the stage. “Uniquely, this show is stadium-ready,” he quips.

He also freely admits that he’s still ‘working out how to treat the audience through a camera’.

So off he pops and then up he pops, a huge intimate face on a screen, talking the most exquisite nonsense, interspersed with live puppeteering. Well, I say puppeteering, but I’m talking about it in the Captain Pugwash sense – more a sort of crude animation really, consisting of rudimentary drawings of figures, birds, landscapes, all doing nothing in particular, all spouting the oddest of odd things.

A critic once said that Munnery‘s shows are ‘the nearest thing to art that comedy gets’ so off he riffs on that, happily drawing Venn diagrams to show how that turns out to be not a compliment at all.

The secret of beatboxing was once imparted to him by a bloke he met at Glastonbury (turns out it’s boots and cats and pop into the chemist – who knew?) so a small musical interlude turns up. There’s a deleted scene from Romeo and Juliet which has Benvolio talking about nothing more than eating an onion whilst popping up from behind a bush, and Pythagoras’ Theorem is gone over in the style of Mr T from the A-Team as a supply maths teacher in Detroit.

If all that sounds bewildering, then that’s because it is. It’s a stream of consciousness, the nearest most youngsters these days will get to any sort of ‘punk ethic’. The show reminded me most of 1980’s nights down at the old Zap Club spent listening to performance poets bewilder a small crowd, and it made me miss those days of DIY and fanzines.

There’s also a touch of 1970’s Czech and Polish kids’ cartoons thrown into the mix. Remember those? Creepy, odd, puzzling to the point of insanity, but strangely compelling to watch, no one could quite work out what they were doing on the telly, let alone in the kids’ section.

Flym (or Fylm in the Comedy Festival brochure so your guess is as good as mine) goes nowhere, but has a lovely little meander around a man’s head, and we watch, close-up, transfixed at the madness.

 

LET’S RUN HIM OVER

(Seann Walsh in The Lie-in King at The Old Market, Hove – October 18 2013)

Four stars

SEANNWALSH_offthekerb_image1

Seann Walsh always sounds like he needs a good cough up and looks like he needs a good wash, so his riffs on slacker culture always seem quite apt.

What I didn’t expect was for him to come across as a loveable fluffy bunny. Or perhaps a cuddly lion would be more appropriate, given his long, flowing blond locks. He does quite often get shouts of ‘Oi,Aslan!’ directed at him, as well as the more disturbing ‘Oi, Justin Lee Collins!’ and ‘Oi, the girl from Outnumbered!’

I reckon he’s got a touch of the Alan Partridges about his voice, and as a mum, I do wish he’d get his adenoids seen to. Is it his adenoids that make you do that horrible hacking sound at the back of your throat? Well, anyway, I digress.

Moulsecoomb boy made good (which isn’t a sentence you hear often), Walsh is familiar to most from appearances on Mock the Week. His comedy is mostly straight observational and, being a local boy, his Brighton references are spot on, from the scumminess of London Road to the special walk that people do in the Laines.

14 year old son Sid was sitting next to me crying with laughter (the first time he’s so much as cracked his face during the whole festival), and the audience lapped up the humour just as much, loving Walsh‘s drunk act and his slo-mo dad football moves.

As we walked back to the car, Walsh was walking up the street in front of us. Sid and I looked at each other and simultaneously muttered ‘run him over!’ But no, we let him walk on, smoking his well-deserved fag….

 

NOT THE BEST OF THE FEST SHOW

(Best of the Fest at the Dome, Brighton – October 19)

Three stars

image

The problem with being a reviewer and seeing the Best of the Fest is that you’ve seen an awful lot of the acts in the actual fest itself, so you sit there stony-faced thinking more about the mechanisms of the gags than just laughing at them.

Thus I sat through the first half looking like I’d sucked a lemon. Seann Walsh (see above – same routine) came and went. Angela Barnes, who I’d seen at the Gala Night (http://gscene.com/brighton-comedy-festival-opening-gala-brighton-dome-review/).

Compared by the newly-trendyish Carl Donnelly, the first half also saw the winner of the Squawker Awards come on stage and get just a titter or two.

Adam Race had won his new title of Squawker of the Year the night before at the Komedia and part of his prize (actually, it may well have been the ONLY part of his prize for all I know) was to come on and try to entertain a lukewarm crowd in, I’m sure, the biggest venue he’s played to date.

I’ll give him his due. He tried his best. If points were awarded for energy and sheer bloody-mindedness, the right bloke won the title. It’s just that his material was a touch thin, but hey ho, he’s just starting out, and I reckon he’s got a future.

The second half perked up a bit, with Donnelly asking the audience whether they like Caroline Lucas. A third apparently do, two thirds vociferously not.

Laconic Welshman Lloyd Langford sort of stumbled on stage looking a bit lost, and talked about underground sex wombles, accidentally ending up in Prowler, and Welshmen abroad taking on sharks. Well-judged and well-delivered, he won the Dome audience over in no time and just as he was warming up, he buggered off. I’d have liked to have seen a bit more.

Last up was Pete Firman, a comedy magician who sounds like Eric Morecambe. His is a slick act, full of quick gags and impressive slight of hand, and like any magician, he knows how to get the best out of audience participation, although even he couldn’t magic a twenty quid note out of the pocket of a bloke who, when just asked what he did, had said ‘artist’. He had to make do with a teacher’s fiver in the end. Such is life in Brighton in the twentytens.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

X