Comedy news: Such Small Portions's review

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Should Prince Harry drop out of the army and run a Jersey children’s home? Newsrevue, held at the Canal Café Theatre in the heart of London’s Little Venice, seeks to answer this topical news question and more.

With its director and cast of two men and two women changing every few weeks, and weekly updated material from a number of different writers, Newsrevue has been providing punters with their regular fix of satire for nearly 30 years.

In tonight's performance the British monarchy were not the only ones to get a right royal send-up, as Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling fell victim to parody as General Melchett and the weedy Captain Darling.

Meanwhile on the other side of the fence, David Cameron as Oliver Hardy struggled to tutor Boris Johnson as a sexually depraved Stan Laurel, proclaiming “I want to put my dingle in her”.

Newcastle manager Kevin Keegan featured in his own Monty Python’s Life of Brian – ‘He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very average football manager.’

The comedy quartet interspersed the sketches with some excellently written songs – ‘Why don’t you come home sober, Amy?’ to the tune of Winehouse’s Valerie as one example. Within this format some of the more daring and relevant humour was allowed to bloom. A good response was met for the adaptation of children’s song

‘There were three in the bed and the little one said roll over’:

"There were three in the jail and Jack Straw said, “Bail Early, Bail Early”, So they gave bail early and one came out and knifed a prozzie and raped a scout.’

Unfortunately, the very format of the News Revue - four actors performing sketches by a multitude of individual writers - meant that not all of the show was of the same standard.

The sketch about the Spice Girls, singing about how they don’t like each other and only reformed for the money, failed to come up with a new angle and descended into wooden slapstick. Equally, tired jokes about Margaret Thatcher not having a heart dated material which is aiming to be at the cutting edge.

Ultimately the meal was like a Sunday dinner with huge slices of chickeny comedy greatness and crunchy roasties of lyrical wizardry, but with a small amount of crappy joke sprouts. Although if it really was a Sunday roast you could force feed the Brussels to the dog.

David Doyle

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As first nights go, this one had its flaws. When the top act cancels at the last minute and the second billed is late, things are probably going downhill.

Yet 99 Club Pick and Mix was so inexplicably brilliant I’m going to wear t-shirts bearing the night’s name every day and cover my Facebook profile with links and recommendations for their next event.

Two people managed to salvage the wreck. Sporting a pink dressing gown and crusty make up, landlady Helen Heels (Caroline Mabey, pictured) buoyed up the evening with well-observed jibes at the audience. She demanded one attendee pretend to be her long lost son with her, then insisting he sing “Je t’aime” with her.

Saviour of the night, however, was Simon Munnery, playing Alan Parker, mock-revolutionary and excellent drunk. Planning to change the world from his humble home in Brockenhurst, he proclaimed one moment that he was in the first stage of his no language campaign, then in the next that his sexual preference is being a wanker. The act has been around for over ten years – but should never be dropped.

Less successful was Jade the Folk singer (aka Sarah Adams), a lesbian folk singer. She sang about her boyfriend having sex with her mum, calling her mum a “big fat whale”. She asked the audience if they felt sick when they looked at her, and then explained if they did that was because she was gay. The direction of her act was inconsistent, which was unforgivable considering how easy a target folk singers are.

Robin Ince stepped in to save the day when Simon Day cancelled at the last minute. 99 Club Pick and Mix is a sketch and character comedy night, so Day’s stand up offering was a little random. Still, he managed to get a good few giggles out of the assembled crowd.

On this occasion, 99 Club Pick and Mix lived up to its name. Go see the next offering: you never know what might happen.

99 Pick & Mix launch night @ 71 Blandford Street, W1 London, 10 May 2008

Holly Falconer

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Comedy fans of a certain vintage will have fond memories of Stewart Lee, the acerbic, Buddy-Holly-coiffed genius behind Fist of Fun and This Morning With Richard Not Judy. After a few years away from the comedy scene, during which he has directed the uproarious, affectionate, yet toweringly controversial Jerry Springer - The Opera, he has been provoked in to re-emerging.

The catalyst for his reappearance was the Channel 4 show, The 100 Best Stand-Ups. Gratified though he was to sneak in at 41, he felt that he could improve upon the list. In his own words: “I have arrived at my own list of the ten best stand-ups of all time, based on my insider knowledge and a secret ballot of myself conducted by me”.

This first show in a series of five at UCL’s Bloomsbury Theatre, then, was advertised as featuring Simon Munnery and a “Mystery Star”, “so damned famous that he cannot and will not be named”, with Lee himself compèring.

Looking older and somewhat portlier than in his lean, youthful days on C4 with Richard Herring, Lee’s laidback, undemanding style nonetheless is no more than a velvet glove around the iron fist of his sardonic, angry humour.

He opened with a tale about a Jehovah’s Witness who accosted him at his door (“Jesus is the answer. What is the question?” “Um. Complete the name of this seventies rock and roll band - The Blank and Mary Chain”) and a section about his attendance at Stoke Newington Weight Watchers which managed to be both an exercise in gentle self-mockery and a searing piece of religious satire. He claims to be the only man whose attempts to lose weight have been thwarted by Islam, and I see no reason not to believe him.

His best work, though, is when he unleashes his ire on political targets. It is actually very refreshing to see good old-fashioned political comedy - the style these days seems to be towards directionless offensiveness-for-its-own-sake and unstructured surrealism, so his volleys against the halfwits who complain about “political correctness gone mad” were both welcome and inspired.

Reminding us of some of the more disgraceful episodes in British political life of the last few decades, he mused that, if PC-dom had achieved anything, “it has made the Tory party dress up its inherent racism in more creative language”. A cleverly mimed bit about Richard Littlejohn amending the gravestones of murdered prostitutes also worked well, and ended with the most thoroughly-deserved use of a word that rhymes with “runt” you are ever likely to hear.

Of course the risk is that a legendary comic such as Lee could easily be the best thing on the bill, which might not be what you want out of a compère. And, to an extent, so it proved, at least compared with the next act.

Simon Munnery

Simon Munnery - or rather his alter ego, angry not-so-young man Alan Parker Urban Warrior - is a fine performer, and quite capable of carrying a show on his own, but next to the feline, unflappable Lee his shouty, aggressive style seemed uncouth, almost attention-seeking. While many of his jokes were excellent - referring to a comment by Brett Anderson, late of Suede, that he considered himself a homosexual despite not having ever had any sex with a man, Munnery/Parker opined that he still regarded himself as a Worker - it never felt like anything other than a mismatch; a heavyweight (Stoke Newington Weight Watchers notwithstanding) against a middleweight.

To give Munnery his due, the audience were generally on his side, and his lengthy skit about masturbation (“I’m a wanker. That’s my sexual preference. Or rather predicament”) and joined-up thinking about how a nation of wanking males and bulimic females could be used as the solutions to each other’s problems (think it through) got some of the best laughs of the night. But it felt almost cruel lining him up against Lee.

The Mystery Guest

After all the suspense and intrigue surrounding the Mystery Guest, it was hard to imagine what name would be anything other than a let-down when they were announced. Short of a Bill Hicks comeback tour, I couldn’t think of one.

In the circumstances, therefore, the discovery that it was none other than Johnny Vegas was actually a pleasant surprise. The self-confessed idiot - who looked rather slimmer than his previously-advertised eighteen stone; presumably his Weight Watchers experience was more successful than Lee’s - is nothing if not watchable, albeit often in a multi-car pile-up sort of way.

And so it proved. He opened his set with an actual attack, warning the audience that he was going to stage-dive. No-one really believed him until he took a run-up and launched his still ample frame fully eight feet through the air, landing on some poor unfortunate in the front row.

Astonishingly, paramedics were not required, and Vegas was able to carry on his show, his strange, angry, self-pitying - yet oddly engaging - persona in full swing. As is his way he selected one or two audience members and made their life hell. One girl got what we assumed was the full blast of his neediness (“You’re lovely. A really good listener. Maybe it’s because you’re petrified”) early on, but the true extent of his audience abuse was yet to be revealed.

Somehow veering between discussing defecating on children’s heads and encouraging audience members to digitally penetrate strangers, Vegas seemed in his element, although as ever with him it is hard to tell where the character stops and the real man starts. Was he serious, as he claimed, when he started talking about his mother having cancer? He revels in making the audience uncomfortable, which is a Marmite tactic - you either love it or hate it.

He attempted to end with a Snow White skit, bringing the same unlucky girl from the front row up, carried on as though dead by six (for some reason) “dwarfs”, also selected from the audience. Bizarrely - after unreservedly groping her supposedly-unconscious form for half a minute or so - when he tried to wake her with a kiss (and predictably went in for the full French with tongues) she responded, and we were treated to a frankly unlikely image of Vegas enjoying a several-second snog with a girl he had apparently never met before.

It all seemed fitting, though - after starting the show with a physical assault, it seemed meet to end it with a sexual one. One day I imagine he will get sued, but the Bloomsbury audience loved it.

Regarding Stewart Lee’s project to bring together the ten greatest stand-ups of all time - you imagine he is doomed to failure. However, he certainly managed to find two good ones for his opening night, and besides, as long as the man himself is there to bind things together, I for one wouldn’t care greatly who filled in the gaps. Just rename it the Stewart Lee Show and he’ll be fine.

Tom Chivers

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At its best, comedy is lean and to the point.

When “Laughing in a Foreign Language” was curated, this fact was forgotten. The exhibition has great intentions, as its tagline, “30 artists explore humour from around the world”, suggests. An inspiring precept: but the task of investigating this theme fails. Like a bad joke, the excess detail - or in this case, the excess art - distracts from the punchline.

For there is a punchline. Amongst the cacophony of noise from installations, there are some fantastic pieces. Olaf Breuning’s video Home2 mocks the western tourist’s attempt to connect with the world on their travels. The naïve subject of the installation hands out dollars to poor Ghanaian kids and talks ecstatically about getting away from the tourist track by hanging out with locals, only making a fool of himself in the process. It makes its point well, and big laughs spill out from Home2's section.

Taiyo Kimura’s piece “Untie me (stool for a guard)” is a brilliant visual pun. Made to resemble a curled up man, it doubles up as a chair. It also reads out stops from the Circle Line, adding to the artist’s ability to twist the mundane.

Julain Rosefelt’s “Clown” is also wonderful: while the clown who takes centre stage in this video installation may not be telling jokes, his endless journey underlines the melancholy that lies at the centre of so much humour. The clown climbs and wanders through a rainforest, with no apparent aim, and it is impossible to avert one’s gaze.

If the curators of this exhibition had stuck to a small number of such pieces, “Laughing in a Foreign Language” could be an engrossing dip into art and comedy. Unfortunately, it tries too hard: by the end of the exhibition the viewer has encountered so many weak puns and political statements that overload is inevitable. The hung up old clown boots, a children’s joke machine that produces adult gags when prompted (pictured) and a parasitic web of politicans’ heads are such examples.

But pop down for a gander anyway. After all, every year punters sample innumerable comedy gigs in the hope of finding that humour high. In the same way, the weak elements of this exhibition are worth bearing. The task of seeking out the best pieces makes them all the more satisfying once found.

Laughing in a Foreign Language at the Hayward Gallery, London; until April 13th

Holly Falconer