Comedy news: Raising the roof at the Leicester Comedy festival 2010

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Less than a week into Leicester’s 17-day comedy marathon, one thing is clear: this is no standard, meat and two veg, standup-in-the-backroom-of-a-pub type of festival.

The opening weekend alone offered a cabaret show; a burlesque party with live poetry readings, pole dancing, music and comedy skits; interactive animation beamed from a giant screen in the city’s shopping district; a concert by the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain; and a “charity shop DJ” event at the YMCA, where comedians took to the decks.

I kicked off on Friday with what was, in form, conventional comedy from the charming 26-year-old Tom Allen, in a bar underneath the Belmont hotel. But Allen, for all his skill, is no conventional comedian—berating audience is not his thing, for one. And he deftly avoided the clichés that have become so overused in comedy of late—poking fun at the boy scouts not because they are run by paedophiles (as a far too many would-be “funny” men tend to), but because “they prepare 7-year-old's for war.”

This is something he could never get into, he told us, because “he has the wrong shoulders for it.” His show, dedicated to all the women he has ever loved (but not in that way) was gently camp, warm and natural—and as his confidence builds he’ll definitely be one to watch.

Then, for something entirely different, I moved on to the cabaret show “The Crack,” which featuring sword-swallowers, ventriloquists, acrobats and musicians

For a rundown of why this is one of the most exciting things about live comedy in Britain today, read my review in the forthcoming issue of Prospect magazine, published on 25th February.

I finished the night at Imaginarium at the City Rooms: the official opening party of the festival. The event will be repeated on Friday 19th February to close the festival, and is well worth a punt—whether or not poetry, amateur pole dancing or a team of doctors doing short comedy skits is your thing.

The following day served up another feast of (quite diverse) experiences. Leicester’s De Monfort University hosted an all-day symposium on comedy and performance, in which performers and academics from across Britain discussed comedy in performance—from stand-up to music hall, from playwriting to sketch shows, from slapstick to satire. The aim was to explore and develop “critical and creative analyses of comedy in, and as, performance: at what cost, comedy?”

While that may well sound too highfalutin for some, there was plenty of actual performance going on elsewhere. From noon until 3pm, live and interactive animation was beamed from a giant screen in the heart of the city’s shopping district. Titled “Hand From Above,” the animation, a creation of artist Chris O’Shea, appeared to pick­ up members of the public like tiny toys, tick­ling them around or squash­ing them. As one might expect, people were astonished, freaked out and delighted in equal measure.

After that, it was back to more traditional sketch comedy in the shape of “Broken Holmes”—a four-player sketch show starring an opium-addled Sherlock Holmes and his faithful, lovesick servant Dr Watson. The concept was a potentially brilliant one, but the performance itself was embarrassingly thin—all the players were in bad need of acting lessons and the whole show, conceptually, failed to grasp the meaning of the word “farce.”

This appeared like a case—all too frequent in sketch comedy—of perfectly competent writers believing that they can perform their own material. If so, the firm lesson should be: stick to the writing. Above all, I was left wondering what kind of opium makes someone behave like a deranged crackhead, as this Sherlock Holmes did?

Rob Rouse at Firebug that evening, by contrast, was a consummate pleasure. While horny family pets, religion, awkward in-laws and fatherhood are all familiar comic territory, they are rarely accompanied by a (rather touching) slideshow, nor are all comics quite so adept at ad-libbing in response to the audience.

The show was expertly structured and his delivery was well-judged, but it was perhaps most intriguing during the unscripted moments. Rouse will next be appearing at the Glasgow comedy festival on 24th March.

If you’re sorry to have missed any of that, you should be. But don’t despair. In addition to more charity shop DJs and another Imaginarium bash at the City Rooms, still to come are, to name a few: Jon Richardson, John Bishop, more from Tom Allen, Paul Sinha and many more. Well worth a visit, in this humble reviewer’s opinion.

Mary Fitzgerald