Laughter in the Dark

I went to see Richard III at the Globe a few weeks ago. Mark Rylance was brilliant - shaggy; languid; ursine; subtly, pitifully repulsive - and, along with the rest of the cast, didn't bat an eyelid when a man in Bay C had what looked like a stroke and was gently extricated by a hoary team of ushers. But what spoilt the evening was the lady sat directly behind me, who didn't stop laughing throughout the play.

Richard III has its mildly funny moments, especially with old Rylance pantomiming to the front row, but it was telling which bits made her laugh: any vague mention of key plot or thematic buzzwords ('The Tower', Bosworth, a red rose, boars, Wales) elicited the strangest type of laughter, the sort of laughter you only hear in the theatre. It starts as a knowing, "don't say I didn't warn you"-type throat-clear, then shifts up a semitone into a hollow, self-congratulatory guffaw, and is often followed by a leisurely glance over the shoulder to see who else got it. It is divorced from humour. Yet the most depressing thing about this laughter is that the lady behind me was just one of dozens in our audience guilty of it: indeed, it seemed to become a sort of inane competition for who can understand or recognise a particular bit first.

Don't get me wrong, I love a laugh as much as the next man, even in a theatre (I once saw Rory Bremner live - a wonderful evening). But there's something about older, slightly more complicated plays and earnest new ones that elicits (from certain people) this smug, tepid, middle-class rictus-gargle. It is not the sound of people enjoying themselves, but of a stupefying, centuries-old, socio-intellectual flock insecurity. They are laughing at the shadows of the dialogue rather than the dialogue itself. The exaggerated public laugh is self-indulgent cultural territory-marking, the equivalent of cocking a hind leg over a work and pissing on it (or, indeed, farting on it). People who laugh like this are cousins to head-nodders and knee-tappers at sit-down music gigs (see any Later with Jools Holland audience) and those who preach and preen in art galleries.

Is it just me? Am I a grumpy git? Is there anything wrong with people laughing whenever they like? Unlike many, the sound of other people's laughter during a performance can turn me into even more of a bad mood bear. A Tim Key gig last year was tarnished for just this reason, and I adore Tim Key. In the Holy Trinity of high-end ‘art comedy', if Stewart Lee is the Father and Daniel Kitson the Son, Key is the e.e.cummings-flecked Holy Ghost. He is peerless. But I was sat on the very right of a horseshoe-shaped auditorium that night in Edinburgh and had a view of the entire audience, whose readiness to laugh at every single tiny gesture made the laughter track on series three of Little Britain seem understated. It reminded me of the same sort of empty, sycophantic laughter you get when, say, Tom Cruise goes on Jonathan Ross, the laughter of people who are saying “I've got a ticket to Tim Key and I'm laughing at him” (completely different to the nervous, bewildered, more scattered, occasionally thunderous laughter that met his early gigs).

God knows why we laugh when we do. You’ve Been Framed was on the other night: I watched some of it, perversely curious and staggered that it was still on, and it shames me how often I laughed (most of the clips involved old men falling onto or into things, like ponds). But I find even the computerised canned laughter of YBF has more soul than this theatre laughter, which reverberates with a sort of socio-cultural, unthinking mob clang, almost like a football chant or a prescribed response in a religious order of service. By all means have a drink when you’re at the Globe: you might even hire a cushion for a pound. But before you laugh, just think: did you really find that bit funny, or are you just showing off?

Sheeps

Sheeps: A Sketch Show, Pleasance Courtyard Hut, 11:00pm and 4:45pm

Many critics have noted, and possibly over-intellectualised, the decision taken by certain members of certain sketch groups (including all three Penny Dreadfuls and the bearded one from Pappy’s) to do their own solo shows at Edinburgh this year. Whatever their reasons, the creative spring-clean comes not a moment too soon for some: last year’s Penny Dreadfuls show, in an enormous venue full of guffawing disciples, was a dull, complacent mess. More excitingly, if it means that the wiser and purer likes of Sheeps have more room in the sketch field to flourish, this can only be a very good thing.

There are three Sheeps and they are all former Cambridge Footlights. Alastair Roberts is angular, stern, birdlike, and often the Peter Cook alpha tone-setter. The sketch where he is unable to play the straight man to a wigged, mincing, lisping mad professor (a rare genuinely funny sketch-within-a-sketch) is probably rooted in some sort of rehearsal truth. Daran Johnson is the cheery, boyish, flexible fall-guy and the emotional compass (he corpsed in at least two sketches, which I rather liked). But Liam Williams is the most impressive. He is a terrifyingly good performer: haggard, quiet-eyed and blessed with the soft intensity of a character actor (someone like Gabriel Byrne or Jonathan Pryce), his movement and delivery shimmer with class and certainty, even in the most throwaway lines. About thirty seconds in, he says, “Hello, mate” to Johnson in such an unusual, sweet, patient way that it was probably my favourite moment of the show.

The writing is tremendous. The only sketch that shows at the seams, one that belongs to a far less imaginative student troupe (or Harry and Paul), is the interview with the footballer whose every answer includes ‘at the end of the day’. But the rest are fluent, original, varied, and crammed with subtle delights. They also come very quickly: the three run between sketches like Twenty20 cricketers running between overs. They frame the show neatly too, beginning with a selection of ‘deleted scenes’ (which included a worryingly convincing medley of cod-Oliver! songs) and finishing with a brilliantly blocked ‘highlights reel’.

This is the very best kind of sketch comedy: wry, effervescent, rich, self-aware, impeccably performed and oddly moving. Please go and see it.

Tom Rosenthal

Child of Privilege, Pleasance Courtyard Attic, 9:30pm

What a crafty, inventive and playful debut solo this is. Tom Rosenthal has transposed the Powerpoint-propelled pseudo-pomp of Jonny Sweet to a concept piece (loosely) about privilege where the audience is divided on arrival: those who end up on the right side of the venue are treated to cushions, programmes and Ferrero Rochers, those on the left get bits of old newspaper and (briefly) the company of a tramp.

The revelation of the piece is Tom's butler Leonard. He greets the audience at the door and shows them to their seats (both funny and practical, unlike poor Ahir Shah, who had to restart his show at the Wee Coo four times due to latecomers). Leonard then assists Tom throughout - it was he, Tom tells us, that put together the Powerpoint presentation ('I took an online course') - before the tables are appropriately turned. It is a lovely tragicomic performance: pained, understated, and a perfect foil to Tom’s exuberance.

The technical fireworks aside, I wonder if some bits are stronger than others. The stuff about his famous dad Jim (ITV Sport legend) is illuminating and self-aware, and there's a very smart sequence about philosophical logic, but the vague digs at Simon Bird (his co-star in Channel 4 sitcom Friday Night Dinner, a show that managed to be so much less than the sum of its parts - salt in the water, oh no!) weren't quite funny enough to avoid the whiff of a lazy showbiz in-joke, and does the self-consciously Stewart Lee self-consciousness add anything to the set? It is increasingly fashionable to knock Lee, the much-imitated Cervantes of stand-up who is slowly turning into the Don Quixote of stand-up in grouchy middle-age, but it’s the sort of gimmick to which a comic as gifted as Tom doesn't need to resort. Then again, the Lee-baiting is part of the entitled, self-promoting persona with a thirst for awards (when asked by Leonard what he would like to drink, Tom requests 'a Perrier. Or a Fosters'), so one shouldn't be too hard on the lad. He also dealt extremely well with a drunk boor in the front row, who, angry at being refused a Ferrero Rocher, gave his name as Chav and parped tedious wisecracks throughout.

To conclude, this is cracking stuff from a hugely likeable act who is, as expected, much better than the TV show for which he is best known (I was surprised that the average age of the audience was as high as it was - no bad thing at all, but it suggests FND wasn't aimed at me). Leonard the butler is worth the entrance fee alone, but the odd provocative urge aside, Child of Privilege is a mischievous, sparkling and remarkably assured debut hour. Fosters?

James Acaster

Amongst Other Things, Pleasance Courtyard Below, 9:45pm

James Acaster is an endearing, unpredictable, quietly audacious young man who combines understated physical comedy with gentle absurdism. He has a blonde mop, a slender, perpendicular frame conducted by wiry, expressive hands, and a soft, slightly nasal Northamptonshire accent. He holds the microphone by the bottom with two pinched fingers as if it were a drawing pin and does a funny thing with his eyebrows, a suggestive, old-fashioned, Eric Idle-style double-raise that makes me laugh every time.

 
He has a lovely sense of rhythm and control, bold enough to slow the tempo right down, to dwell on the consciously banal, and to lower his voice to a half-whisper (there are two tantalising moments within the set where he makes no noise at all for at least two minutes). He is also a dab hand with an audience. He struck gold our night with a gentleman who turned out to be an old university friend of his dad's, and later with two laddish locals, catching one falling asleep twenty minutes in and cajoling the other into re-enacting a tandem sky-dive. Very occasionally, his callback-putdowns might be too clever and faint for their own good (possibly me being slow, but a couple of references seemed to go astray with our sleepy 9:45pm mid-first-week crowd). But this knack at locating fun punters seems to come instinctively and will only improve (about a month ago, for what it's worth, I saw Acaster compère a comedy evening in front of a much larger, rather lethargic and begrudging Shepherd's Bush audience and he was equally impressive, this time happening across a man who drew shoes for a living and changed seats after both intervals: Acaster found him both times).

The subject matter in this, his first solo show, is ingeniously off-beat - the psychology behind the act of 'hiding'; different types of doughnuts and the reactions they elicit; dating as a bouncy castle – and it is handled with warmth and eloquence. The final ten minutes, about a teddy bear called Willoughby that James' mum knitted when he left home, is one of the sweetest, bravest codas I've seen in an Edinburgh show (curiously, both Acaster and Alex Horne feature teddies sitting behind microphones, though Horne's panda moves and talks while Willoughby very much doesn't).

This is a joy: a clever, fresh, acute and deceptively dangerous debut that picks up on every tiny ambiguity, awkwardness or nervous lilt in the audience members he picks on. The show probably deserves a Best Newcomer nomination, but more importantly, this heralds the arrival of perhaps the subtlest figure in the new, post-Key wave.

Wil Hodgson

Punkanory

Wil Hodgson’s ‘Punkanory’ is an erudite, anti-linear, intense social commentary that covers, amongst much else, punk, the Spice Girls, female sexuality, Eastenders, film studies, car boot sales and the homophobia (and possible latent homosexuality) of Dennis the Menace. Hodgson, with shaven pink hair, pink nails and tattoos aplenty, stares unnervingly at audience members and speaks in a West Country monotone that can suffocate the poetry of his theories. Indeed, the humour is almost incidental (and the asides sometimes rather basic), and Hodgson is probably at his most fascinating and original when on more serious ground, a sort of cultural lay preacher. He opens with a pitch-perfect deconstruction of punk’s superstition and dogma, positing that it is no less restrictive than organised religion. His disarmingly intellectual analysis of the Spice Girls, his social realist extrapolation of Walter the Softie (now a fashion photographer) and his encounter with a washed-up Dennis in a pub, and his tongue-in-cheek essay on Pinocchio as a Nazi propaganda film are particularly ingenious.

The structure of the show, too, is complex: each stall at a car boot sale Hodgson recalls is a narrative Chinese box, intricate stories-within-stories that unfurl anecdotes, opinions and reflections of varying quality. The stuff at the end about mature porn is, in my opinion, too deliberate a left-field sexual finale, and undermines the punk-imbued restraint of what precedes it. Hodgson claims that his act is left untouched by fifty percent of comedy clubs, but his allusions to Care Bears, My Little Pony, the merits of Steps’ earlier work (before they became too highbrow), the decline in the British comics industry and ‘The Pickwick Papers’ reveal a subversive sensitivity and lack of self-possession. ‘Punkanory’ is fairly hard work – dense, outspoken and couched in quite dry, breathless delivery – but it is one of the more insightful shows I’ve seen at this year’s Fringe, and one which transcends the sanctimonious connotations of the soapbox Hodgson places on stage. An enlightening, if arduous hour.

This review was originally written for the Broadway Baby on August 14^th 2010.

Reginald D. Hunter

Trophy Nigga

Reginald D. Hunter, or RDH as the blood-red letters behind him read, is as suave and effortless as comedians come, and this, his sixth Edinburgh show, has the cadence and rhythm of a Bill Withers concert (whose voice his resembles). One can almost imagine a drummer percussing every four beats throughout the set, as during the spoken parts of Withers' 'I Can't Write Left-Handed'. But, as with Arj Barker, this is a show of occasional brilliance and ultimate mild dissatisfaction, one that coasts when it should soar.

Hunter begins by lamenting his position, in the eyes of BBC producers, as some sort of spokesperson for black people, one he would only accept if introduced as 'Reginald, King of the Blacks'. He reflects on race, racism, English conservatism and his childhood in Georgia with characteristic eloquence and verve, but perhaps his subtlest observations and quips are the funniest. His description of a too-good-to-be true train carriage with lots of leg room ('crucial for a cat like myself'), his fondness for English TV on US channel PBS ('Rumpole of the motherfucking Bailey') and, in particular, his discovery of sarcasm, an advanced state of being which would sift the clever from the stupid, are real highlights. Some of his punchlines are a bit predictable (on people's problems with a word in his title and on paying compliments to women, for instance), but he finishes strongly with a subversive defense of Tiger Woods and the best farewell line I've seen at Edinburgh this year.

This is a wide-ranging, highly intelligent, surprisingly political routine and Hunter has an irresistible verbal and physical allure, but some of the stuff on men and women is rather old hat, the sections on race could go even further and the entire set would be richer for those blink-and-you'll-miss-'em observational pearls that shimmer and fade like shooting stars. A master of the musicality of humour, Hunter can and will do better shows than this.

This review was originally written for the Broadway Baby on August 13^th 2010.

Jonny Sweet

Let's Just Have Some Fun (and Learn Something, For Once)

What a lovely, original and unpredictable show this is. Some may recognise Jonny Sweet from his purring, devious David Cameron in the dubious More4 docudrama ‘When Boris Met Dave’ or from his deliciously smarmy cameo in the London nightclub episode of ‘The Inbetweeners’ (he came within a whisker of playing one of the leads, alongside fellow ex-Footlights and ‘House of Windsor’ members Simon Bird and Joe Thomas). But Sweet is at his strongest and funniest at his most endearing, and his lecturer alter-ego – sporting a bow-tie, pink shirt and tight trousers – is a masterclass in character comedy. Sweet sets the affable tone by offering high fives and hugs to audience members as they enter: I gave him a sideways, American-style hand-clasp and accidentally hit him in the mouth, at which point he recoiled, ran across the room, whispered in a woman’s ear, pointed at me, ran back and told me he was legally allowed to hit me in return; I braced myself, but he admirably chose not to. This private performance only lasted about thirty seconds and the show hadn’t even started, but already I was enthralled: indeed, in this persona, Sweet exudes exceptional sincerity, warmth and socio-comical dexterity, perhaps more than any young comedian in the country.

The show is all the more astonishing when it is, essentially, a lecture on the HMS Nottingham, a “ninety percent decommissioned frigate” on which Jonny’s character seems to have served at some stage. But Sweet imbues it with such enthusiasm, irony and supreme comic timing that one wonders why nobody has used the HMS Nottingham as a springboard for a stand-up show before. Sweet involves the audience brilliantly (tapping knees, winking, etc), especially in the final stages of the show. I am very keen not to give any jokes or surprises away, but it is a beautifully constructed and nuanced set. It is further enriched by the most ingenious use of Powerpoint and a projector I’ve seen, though this is perhaps unsurprising: Sweet, managed by ‘The Invisible Dot’, is from the same visionary stable as Tim Key and John-Luke Roberts, two stand-ups who also push the technological boundaries of live comedy. One can almost imagine Dot kingpin Simon Pearce himself giving Microsoft Office tutorials to his young protegés. What next I wonder? A series of Excel spreadsheets on fractional distillation?

There is very little to criticise here. Every now and then, there is the slightest hint of Alan Partridge in his pseudo-self-satisfied delivery, but Sweet’s lecturer is far more likeable and engaging and the comparison is a testimony to his timing and conviction rather than an accusation of imitation. The small venue works in the show’s favour, lending the room the feel of a slightly stuffy subterranean university lecture hall; Sweet, who won last year’s Edinburgh Comedy Best Newcomer award for ‘Mostly About Arthur’, could comfortably sell out venues twice this size, but it demonstrates refreshing humility that this year’s show has the personal intimacy of a chamber piece, or a private acoustic live performance. In fact, there is nothing to criticise here. It is hard to pick a favourite moment without spoiling it, but the final fifteen minutes of the set is a display of breathless brilliance, an impressionistic maelstrom of comedic invention that hints that we have only just scratched the surface of Sweet’s delightful, unique and modern mind. Quite wonderful.

This review was originally written for the Broadway Baby on August 7^th 2010.