Comedy
Losing the plot
On the face of it, ITV’s Peter & Wendy sounded like a perfect family offering for Boxing Day: an adaptation…
Tricycle’s Ben Hur is magnificent in its superficiality – a masterpiece of nothing
It’s the target that makes the satire as well as the satirist. Is the subject powerful, active, relevant and menacing?…
Beyond a joke
Let’s start this week with a joke: ‘You know Mrs Kelly? Do you know Mrs Kelly? Her husband’s that little…
Shakespeare at his freest and most exuberant: The Wars of the Roses reviewed
The RSC’s The Wars of the Roses solves a peculiar literary problem. Shakespeare’s earliest history plays are entitled Henry VI…
Love, loneliness and all that jazz
Woody Allen (born Allan Stewart Konigsberg), the prolific, Oscar-winning auteur, New Orleans-style jazz clarinettist, doyen of New York delicatessen society,…
A captivating prospect
What could happen in literature to a young couple — or a pair of young couples — who fall off…
Comic relief
Mum’s, or to use its full title, Mum’s Great Comfort Food, is a restaurant in Edinburgh designed to soothe itinerant…
Edinburgh on Thames
Showstopper! The Improvised Musical offers a brand new song-and-dance spectacular at every performance. It opens with a brilliantly chaotic piece…
Chekhov by numbers
Chekhov so dominates 19th-century Russian drama that Turgenev doesn’t get much of a look-in. His best known play, A Month…
Maestro maker
The writer and director Peter Bogdanovich has made three of my favourite films of all time (The Last Picture Show,…
Are you being funny?
Monday saw the return of possibly the weirdest TV series in living memory. Imagine a parallel universe in which Are…
Funny business
What does it take to be a stand-up comic? Jackie Mason has absolutely no idea
Rock bottom
The oeuvre of Chris Rock may not be fully known in this parish. He was the African-American stand-up who made…
Scabrous lyricism
Irvine Welsh, I think it’s safe to say, is not a writer who’s mellowing with age. His latest book sees…
Arch absurdity
Miranda July is a funny and brilliant film director, performance artist, sculptor and smartphone app designer. In 2005, she won…
Horror show
The Voices is ‘a dark comedy about a serial killer’, which is not an overcrowded genre, and I think we…
Spitting Image
Hold the front page! Spitting Image is back! Well, sort of. A new six-part series, from (some of) the team…
Friends reunited
New venue. New enticement. In the undercroft of a vast but disregarded Bloomsbury church nestles the Museum of Comedy. The…
Transported by Tolstoy
To have listened to Radio 4’s marathon ten-hour adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace as it was being broadcast on…
Marx men
Ian Thomson celebrates the anarchic genius of Groucho and his brothers
North star
Fortune tellers, pound shops and Orville: it’s easy to take the piss out of Blackpool, but William Cook loves it
You shouldn’t watch Dapper Laughs. But you really shouldn’t let the likes of me stop you
As you’ll know by now, I’m big on thinking the right things. Should a thought strike me that m’colleague Rod…
Kilkenny Notebook
‘What is a Minsky moment, anyway?’ asks Gerry Stembridge, an Irish satirist. ‘I’ve been reading about them in the papers…
The greatest sitcom never made
Funny Girl is the story of the early career of the vivacious, hilarious Sophie Straw, star of the much-loved BBC…
Disaster movie
What We Did On Our Holiday is written and directed by Guy Jenkin and Andy Hamilton, the pair who created…
