Fringe Review - The Best of Irish Comedy, The Stand, 17/08/2008

Ensemble shows with an ever changing line-up can be a bit of a hit and miss affair at the Fringe. The "Best of Irish" and "Best of Scottish" shows at the Stand can some days feature some of the biggest and best in the business, and the next you can be treated to four complete unknowns. On this day, however, the bill featured two of the old stalwarts of the Irish comedy scene, so disappointment was unlikely to feature.

Opening the show and acting as compere was Bernard O'Shea, a new name to me but clearly a very experienced and natural performer. A chirpy chappy from Northern Ireland, he made great play over the complete lack of sexiness in both his appearance and his name, entertains us with a shaggy dog story in the form of a song, and makes a lengthy plea for more global warming so that he can improve his tan. There isn't much audience interaction, but he doesn't need it as he is great fun and gets the room nicely warmed up.

Elaine Malcolmson may, however, have been slightly put out by the fact that he introduced her as Elaine Williamson, and repeated the error later in the show, which is something he should maybe sort out, as it is disrespectful at best. I am an unashamed fan of Malcolmson's dry deadpan humour, but have to admit that she struggled a little at this show. I think maybe the early hour in the evening did her no favours, with an audience in from work or from shopping, looking for easy laughs and not in the mood for clever wordplay. Her "I'll do anything for a biscuit" material went down well, but some of the more intricate jokes seemed to fall on deaf ears.

Owen O'Neill is such an experienced old hand at the stand-up game, and such an instantly recognisable face to anyone who has spent any time in Ireland from his appearances in various TV shows and movies like The General and Michael Collins, that it is something of a surprise that he is not the headline act, although an indication of the quality of performers The Stand can attract. His laid-back but incisive humour holds the audience from the word go, from comparisons between expensive hairdressers and old-fashioned barbers, to tales of growing up in a family of 16 children, all punctuated with trademark bizarre facial expressions.

Headline act Michael Redmond is equally recognisable, as evidenced by the fact that the moment he took the stage an audience member shouted out "you were electrocuted in Father Ted!" But Redmond's style is the antithesis of O'Neill's carefully constructed anecdotes, as he shambles around the stage seeming to make his act up as he goes along. Much of his time is spent talking randomly to audience members, especially a front row South African whose beer he quickly appropriates. But Redmond makes it all look effortless, and he is one of those comedians blessed with the ability to get as big a laugh from a simple hangdog expression as he can from any of his gags.

Of course this is a show with a line-up that changes day by day. But with a roster this strong, it is a clear indication that the quality on offer is never likely to disappoint.

Luke Toulson, Stuart Black, compere Sam Stone - Soho Comedy Club, London, 21/07/2008

Looking for good comedy while finding yourself free for a night in London, at the moment it's difficult to go wrong. My only problem was trying to find an Edinburgh preview show featuring artists I wasn't likely to go to see during the Edinburgh Fringe itself. This one seemed to fit the bill. With two comics I had heard of, but wasn't terribly familiar with, it was a perfect opportunity to catch them at this rough and ready stage of preparation and see whether they might be acts I would want to explore further in the future. As it happened, in both cases the answer was yes.

Sam Stone hosted the evening, but in all honesty had very little to do on this kind of occasion. With only twenty or so in the audience, all crammed into a small stuffy room above a pub off Charing Cross Road, she had the chance to chat to pretty much everyone, find out where they were from, what they did, but there was little by way of warming up needed and she sensibly kept things brief and got the acts on in quick time.

Luke Toulson (above) is a tall shambling man, possibly best known for those with children as Captain DJ in the BBC kids series Space Pirates. That this fact has failed to impress his own five year-old son formed part of his act, much of which was taken up with similar disappointments experienced in his life.

The show, subtitled "There Are So Many Things I Can't Do," is Toulson's first as a solo performer, although he is something of an Edinburgh veteran, most recently as part of a double act with Stephen Harvey. He tells us it follows the story of two journeys, but in all honesty, as with many of these shows, that is just a framework on which to hang material of all kinds, and although he tells us of a journey to Italy to propose to a girlfriend, the details are sketchy and not really followed through at all.

But that's okay, because his material is good, and even though many of his subjects are well worn, such as a lengthy diatribe about the crapness of Ryanair, he does manage to draw some extra mileage out of them without them ever seeming hack. Indeed I had only one complaint in terms of subject matter, that being did we really need yet another joke about dyslexics not being able to spell dyslexia?

Overall, Toulson is shambling and scruffy and easy-going, and overall an easy person to warm to and the sort of act you could imagine having a pint and a chat with, and his act has plenty to keep even the most hardened punter amused.

Physically, at least, Stuart Black could not be more different from Toulson if he tried. Where the latter is gangly and awkward looking, Black is small, sleek and ferret-like. But where there is a similarity is that they both adopt a slightly distracted style to their delivery. In Black's case, to the point where he spends much of his time wandering around on stage, ever-present beer bottle in hand, looking a bit lost and as if he isn't quite sure what to say next.

But the audience should not be taken in by this approach, because it soon becomes clear that he knows exactly what he is doing. The delivery may be fragmentary, but the material itself is anything but, the humour cutting and very direct. Meanwhile his soft West-Country accent lulls you into a false sense of security so that the killer punchlines seem to land with much greater effect.

Black is a relative newcomer by comparison with Toulson, but in all honesty, of the two, is the one I would say was the more likely to go on to great things. Certainly both have the potential to make good club headliners, but Black has that extra quality which makes him one to look out for, and the originality of routines tackling such subjects as why watching hardcore porn makes you gay, shows the kind of off-kilter mind that you imagine could find the humour in almost any given situation.

Andrew Maxwell, Soho Theatre 12/07/08

With only two and a half weeks to go before the opening of this year's Edinburgh Festival, comedians across the country are working hard to iron out any kinks in their new material before presenting it at at the "exams for clowns". Because of this you will find in random venues the fun that is the "work in progress" show.

A work in progress show can be a dangerous thing, occasionally presenting material that hasn't been thought through, doesn't work and isn't funny. Fortunately, with Andrew Maxwell, this isn't the case. Although not yet as slick as the final show will be, the material was strong, and very funny. Maxwell also knows how treat a WIP crowd, making fun of himself and the occasional need to refer to a some jotted down notes without allowing it to disrupt the atmosphere of the evening.

Maxwell's show considers Evil, the concept with a capital E. What he finds is mostly that there are a lot of misguided and incompetent people, but Evil is a lot harder to find. The show is very funny, but does something which I love in a comedy show, which is to use the comedy to make you think of something a bit more serious.

So yes, the show's not perfect yet, but I have every confidence that it will be fantastic by the time he opens the doors at the Pleasance Courtyard, and heartily recommend it to everyone up in Edinburgh. (And think of me while you're there enjoying yourselves...I can't make it up this year.)

Jason Rouse, Gary Delaney, Vince Fluke, Rab Brown, compere Lucy Porter - The Stand, Edinburgh, 05/06/2008

Some comedy nights are a little strange. On this particular night, I found myself seeing a bill of comedians none of whom I was at all familiar with or knew what to expect from, aside from the main draw, being the MC, Lucy Porter, one of my favourite comics whose last four Edinburgh shows I have attended and very much enjoyed but who I had never seen plying her trade as a club comedian before.

In fact she makes a perfect host, her big personality which belies her somewhat diminutive stature filling the room and setting up the room perfectly for laughs. It’s a shame then, that few of the acts were able to take advantage of this, but this takes nothing away from Porter who, during the course of the evening, may even have created the beginnings of a beautiful transatlantic romance between a gruff voiced bearded American and a young girl out celebrating her birthday in the front row.

For the opening act, Vince Fluke, I have to be fair and point out that I later learned that he had only been brought in as a very last minute replacement. Sadly, it showed. A personable Canadian, he never seemed to get to grips with the audience, and from the very beginning of his set seemed to be floundering and constantly changing tack trying to find something to hook the attention with. But the result made his set jumpy and disjointed and make very little sense. Further, he seemed to spend an inordinate amount of his time informing people that he was going to be working at the T in the Park festival, without saying anything particularly funny about it, as if it was going to cause a ripple of recognition, something that was never going to happen in front of a crowd most of whom were either too old or too English to know what it was.

Glaswegian Rab Brown came next, and as the “newcomer” act of the evening, was the one performer who really shone. Taking his chance well, he performed a set of not necessarily very original material, but his take on hen parties, homosexual flirting and his own lack of attractiveness was at least different enough to be memorable, and fulfilled the main objective of being really very funny.

Next up was Gary Delaney, something of an old fashioned gagsmith whose set consisted almost entirely of a series of one-liners and puns. An accomplished writer as well as a comedian, whose jokes can often be heard coming out of the mouths of established TV acts, including Basil Brush, Delaney has a number of excellent gags which soon have the audience on his side. But twenty minutes is a long time to be firing out one pun after another, and to be honest the set could have done with more variety. By about half way through the whole thing felt a bit overloaded, and the audience were becoming noticeably quieter. However, an excellent final few minutes won them back over in the end.

And then came Jason Rouse, another Canadian act, and it’s difficult to know what to say here. Leather clad, tattoo covered and dripping with metal accoutrements from countless piercings and the lining of his teeth, Rouse is a comedian whose main objective is to offend. He sets about this from the word go, reading the mood and the demeanour of the audience and almost resolutely setting himself up in opposition to it. There is little by way of actual humour in his act, rather it consists of a series of statements each designed to push the audience to the limits of their tolerance.

This, in itself, is not a bad thing. There are a number of acts who rely on the same concept, and some of them pull it off very expertly indeed. Rouse, sadly, does not appear to be one of them. There is nothing wrong with being offensive, and it is good when comedy can challenge, but it seems to me that this kind of material should either be leading towards a point, or if not then should at least be very very funny. Rouse’s material was neither. And so relentless was he in piling one sick and twisted image onto another and another, that within not too many minutes, it had even lost the power to shock, simply becoming mundane and, difficult though it is to see how this is possible with subject matter including rape, incest, paedophilia and taking sexual advantage of the mentally impaired, quite frankly boring.

Daniel Kitson - The Impotent Fury of the Privileged - The Stand, Edinburgh, 20/05/2008

Two years ago, when Channel 4 broadcast their list of the hundred greatest stand-ups, voted for by the public, a good many of those watching were probably surprised when a strange little bearded man named Daniel Kitson popped up at number 27, higher than the likes of Bob Monkhouse, Lenny Henry and Graham Norton. Even Channel 4 were probably surprised, the only clip they could find to show was a some poorly shot hand held video footage of the man at an improbably young age.

Kitson has always been something of an oddity in the comedy world, a prodigy who set out at the age of 16 with the ambition to be the best comedian in the world. Not necessarily the most famous, just the best. Whether he has succeeded or not is a matter of taste, but the fact that, despite steering a course which has not included television exposure or the endless rounds of comedy panel shows, his two nights at The Stand were sold out a month in advance, demonstrates how firmly his reputation has rooted itself among the comedy literate.

In recent years Kitson has been moving away from pure comedy towards shows which are scripted monologues, a cross between traditional stand-up and theatre. This show doesn’t quite straddle that line to the same extent as his last few, it remains Kitson talking to his audience rather than going into character, but nonetheless it is a rigidly structured piece focussed around a single idea, which is remarkable for its length.

All told, Kitson is on stage for a little over two hours, although the show itself, as he describes it, takes up one and three quarters of that, the remainder being a warm up and introduction, part explanation of what he is trying to do, part general comedy, and a small part involving a quite devastating put-down of an audience heckler which shows that, whatever else might have changed along the way, he’s still got the goods to deliver.

The show itself revolves around an incident which occurred on the night before Kitson moved out of his flat, a quite slight tale but one which takes on greater and greater significance as he takes diversion after diversion, examining the implications of the incident from every angle and with each revelation leading to the next dilemma. Along the way he takes us through a thorough exploration of the morality of the modern world, and the idea that we all want our world to be a better place but none of us are prepared to do what it takes to bring it about while being critical of others for failures no worse than our own.

And if all that sounds extraordinarily heavy for a comedy show, it is. But in Kitson’s capable hands it is also extremely funny. Delivered at almost inhuman pace, no line of inquiry is left unfollowed, no thought unexplored, and every word is carefully selected and relished until the result becomes almost comedic poetry, floating over an audience who have to work almost as hard as the performer just to take it all in.

And therein lies the one problem with this show. Because two hours without a break is a long time for any comedy audience to concentrate, without the level of complexity and intensity that Kitson brings to the table, and the result is that there are times during the show that you find yourself tuning out and just letting the words wash over you for a while before girding your loins to dive back in.

So while this show is undoubtedly a remarkable achievement, there is such a thing as being too damned clever for your own good, and this probably steps a little too far across that line. Regardless, whatever the shortcomings, Kitson in full flow is a sight to behold, and in the end he only solidifies his reputation and delivers some of the most thought-provoking material you will ever hear while laughing. Overlong and often overcomplicated it may be, but every other comedian in the country would kill to be this good.

Richard Herring, Neil McFarlane, Keith Farnan, Gordon Alexander, compere Susan Calman - The Stand, Edinburgh, 25/04/2008

One of the problems that The Stand encounters as a comedy club is that as the Edinburgh Fringe draws ever closer, so the bigger names on the circuit start to be reluctant to play the city. As such, to pull in one of the biggest names of all at the end of April is quite a coup, and reflected in the bustling house.

Diminuitive Glaswegian Susan Calman is in charge of proceedings for the night, and to my mind she is fast becoming the best MC on the Scottish scene. She has everything you want in a compere, a fast mind, a cutting wit, and a seemingly genuine interest in her targets. She knows when to attack and when to hold back, and how to keep control of the punters who want to take things a bit too far, as well as an innate ability to take anything thrown at her and seamlessly find the right bit of material to suit the moment.

Opening act Keith Farnan set the pace of the evening well. A laid back Irishman from county Cork, he has that easy Irish charm that benefits so many comics from the Emerald Isle. His comedy is very much performed with a wink and a grin, drawing the audience in with a warmth of delivery and a conversational style. And although much of his material is not exactly ground-breaking, mostly revolving around “look at us Irish, aren’t we eejits, we can take anything and make it Irish,” it is nonetheless extremely funny, and as such does the job it sets out to do.

Gordon Alexander is a very blokish comic. Hailing from the north of England but now resident in Scotland, he has been slowly making a name for himself on the local scene. Standing six feet six and with a shaven head, he looks quite a scary sort, but his delivery is quite matey. Unfortunately, although this performance shows promise, his material is not really strong enough for this sort of level and routines which include saying stupid things to the Bullseye Bully’s Prize Board tune, while quite amusing, don’t seem to go anywhere.

Neil McFarlane is another local comic, but one who is starting to move out onto the national scene. Like Farnan, much of his material is based in the experience of being Scottish, and routines revolve around annoying Edinburgh tourists, his middle-class Scottish upbringing, and his years spent working in the BBC Glasgow complaints department. He’s an experienced and polished act, and one who can draw his audience in with his relaxed and often seemingly random style.

Finally we came to Richard Herring, and this was an interesting experience for me, because while I have seen him performing countless times in his own shows, I wasn’t quite sure how he would fit in the more pressured environment of a club night, in front of an audience many of whom had come out for a night of good laughs rather than because of who was on the bill. Herring can be an acquired taste, with his penchant for pedantry, and for often drawing out a gag at excruciating length to the point at which he courts losing his audience altogether.

And the answer, to be honest, was that I’m not sure that he did fit very well. Most of the material for the night was drawn from last year’s Fringe show, and while he started well with some snappy deconstructions of common mottos, when he moved into a lengthy dissection of the slogan on a tee-shirt, which proceeded to form the bulk of the set, I could see he was starting to lose certain sections of the audience who were wishing he would move on and not keep hammering the same topic over and over.

Herring is the first to admit that, despite two decades of stage experience, much of it was spent in the “rehearsed show” format, and he came to pure stand-up late in the day and as such is still learning. His name on the bill, of course, is always going to be a draw, and for a comedy literate crowd the brilliance of his wordplay is a sheer delight. But I think he needs still to learn to judge his crowd and tailor his material to the night. He’s a class act, and no denying it, but for me, on this night, there was just something missing.

Carey Marx, Bishop & Douch, compere Nick Page - The Cellar, Oxford, 28/04/08

How to get people out to comedy gigs on a Monday night? That was the dilemma faced by Paddy Luscombe, the man behind The Free Beer Show. Can you guess how he manages it?

If the students who comprise the vast majority of the audience are aware who compere Nick Page is, then they do a good job of hiding it. Perhaps in these times of tuition fees and rising academic expectations, they're just too conscientious to spend their days sprawled in front of daytime TV, in which case they might not recognise the former presenter of shitey BBC property series 'Escape To The Country'. But somehow I doubt it.

Having begun by getting an uncomfortable laugh with a topical quip about us being squashed together into a confined underground space, Page does briefly savage the programme on which he prostituted himself, but gets more mileage out of his home county, Gloucestershire, being famous for only two things: the bizarre practice of cheese rolling and Fred West. Apparently there's so little to proud of if you're from Gloucester that if you badmouth West someone will come up to you and say "Yeah, but he was a fucking good builder..."

The fact that when Page reappears, some twenty-five minutes later (though it feels like twenty-five hours), he has a bemused smile plastered across his face should tell you something about support act Bishop & Douch (and friends). That that bemused smile raises a far bigger laugh than they could manage certainly should. That his first words are "Anyone need a drink?"...

Tonight's set consists of an amorphous and incoherent sketch that shifts in content and location. It begins with the hapless duo being chastised for a dereliction of duties by their boss at Disneyland, then becomes a tiresomely repetitive deconstruction of the familiar unmasking of Old Man Winters from 'Scooby Doo' with the backing cast stepping out of role to hijack the script, and ends up in a grim place called Sesame Lane.

Whether or not these three phases are deliberate nods to the first series of 'The Mighty Boosh', Charlie Kaufman's 'Adaptation' and David Chapelle's take on 'Sesame Street' respectively hardly matters - it all hangs together by the most tenuous of threads, and elicits far more awkward silence and bewilderment than it does laughs. Page has confessed that the thing he's inherited from his father (other than an excess of body hair) is the inability to avoid saying or doing something if he'll thereby amuse himself, even if only for a moment. I get the feeling I'm not alone in thinking it's unfortunate that Bishop & Douch seem to suffer from the same affliction.

Page welcomes us back after the interval by recounting his fondness for finding lists of names on noticeboards, very deliberately highlighting just one with a fluorescent marker pen and then making his escape, chuckling at the panic his mischief may have unleashed. But any whimsy is soon swept aside as he tells us, in the accelerated style of delivery he uses at times, of the night (which I suspect may be fictional) when he accidentally dosed himself with Rohypnol.

Tonight's billed headliner Rob Deering, who's had to pull out due to family illness, has been described on Chortle as an "easy-going act" whose "audience rapport is in the Eric Morecambe league, with a natural, non-threatening geniality that only the hardest of hearts wouldn't warm to". The same could hardly be said of his last-minute replacement, who apparently once made Princess Beatrice cry for more than an hour - quite probably not with laughter, one suspects.

For the most part, Carey Marx deals in the comedy of cruelty - or what he repeatedly refers to as "harsh jokes". Most are about midgets and women, and most are pretty unfunny and forgettable. All are delivered with a self-satisfied smirk. If there's anything worse than gratuitous offensiveness purely for the sake of it, then it's gratuitous offensiveness purely for the sake of it that tries to dress itself up as something more noble and purposive. Rather than pressing on regardless of the offence his material might cause, Marx irritatingly feels the need to try to justify and defend himself - but just doesn't have the arguments to do so.

It's a shame as much as an annoyance, though, because there's undoubted potential in some of the material, which has been culled from his diary and which is likely to form the basis for an Edinburgh show called 'Careyness' (and hence why I feel a bit like Herod, sticking the knife into the show in its infancy). We follow him out of his front door, through London, up to Scotland, in and out of hotel rooms, and back again - all the time on the look-out for subjects and incidents to riff on. It's a revealing window into the world of the professional stand-up, and the creation of a set, though much of it will probably rightly end up being filtered out when he sits down and seriously pans for the gold.

When he does dwell on something for long enough to probe a little deeper - such as Australian MP Ann Bressington's call for the introduction of "sex contracts" - it's clear that there's a perceptive wit lurking beneath the laddish exterior. Arguably the best element of the set is the mystery of the various bald men spotted around London folding and tearing up newspapers. But Marx's delivery of the punchline, which would make a neat conclusion to the set, is flat and hurried - and indeed would have been forgotten altogether if not for a prompt from a curious audience member.

Perhaps, to adopt a culinary analogy, you shouldn't sample and criticise what the chef's rustling up when it's still undercooked and far from ready - but even still the evening left rather a sour taste in the mouth.

John Bishop - The Stand, Edinburgh, 22/04/2008

The comedy world tends to divide itself into two camps, the modern observational or “alternative” comic, and the old fashioned gag-teller or “mainstream” clown as they are usually described. John Bishop is something of an anomaly, because he seems have fallen with a foot in both camps.

From the moment he walks on stage, wearing an expensive suit and with his hair coiffed within an inch of its life, it is clear that Bishop is closer, fashion-wise, to his seventies counterparts than to most of today’s tee-shirt and jeans brigade. And after an opening in which he explains how unhappy he is to be playing the gig while Liverpool’s European semi-final first leg is live on the telly, and informs his audience that for the first time ever he wants them all to keep their phones on and let him know the score if anyone hears anything, he then spends the rest of the gig perched on a stool, again reminiscent of an earlier style of comedy.

And then there is the first half of the show. Bishop informs us that for the second half he will be performing last year’s Fringe show “Stick Your Job Up Your Arse,” but that for the first half he will simply be talking, acting essentially as his own warm-up act. And having said that, he proceeds to regale us with a series of his most showbiz tales possible. There’s the one about playing golf with Alan Shearer, and the one about going to a private gentlemen’s club in Hong Kong with England rugby star Mark Regan, and then there are others about the various famous names he has met and performed for, and it is all a bit “Tarby and Brucie” if truth be told.

His excuse for telling these stories is his amazement at how suddenly, after turning professional as a comic, he found himself moving in these sorts of circles. But you know somewhere deep down a big part of it is the desire to namedrop wildly. But for all that, he is an excellent raconteur, and so while the subject matter of his material might be something of a throwback to another age, he nonetheless has the ability to take the audience with him and keep the laughter coming at a regular pace.

The second half of the show is more thoughtful and paced. Here he tells the story of how, disillusioned with his life, his job and his marriage, he went through something of a personal crisis and found his way out of it when he discovered comedy. It is a story of giving up the things that made him successful in life, in order to pursue the things that gave him self-respect. And of how trying to be all things to all people nearly lost him everything, but being true to himself won them back again.

It is an engaging tale, if at times slightly self-indulgent, and Bishop has a keen eye to spot the humour in every situation. But it lacked the immediacy of the more unfocussed first part of the show. So that overall I came away with the feeling that Bishop is a good comedian, but he will probably never be a great one. He comes across as likeable, charming and decent, but somehow just a little too glib. Nonetheless, I have no doubt that he won’t be needing to return to his day job any time soon.

Dave Fulton, Dan Evans, Niall Browne, Jay Lafferty, compere Joe Heenan - The Stand, Edinburgh, 17/04/2008

After a weekend show where I had seen almost every act in the recent past, it was refreshing to move on to one where, apart from compere Joe Heenan, I had only seen one of the performers previously, and that one nearly four years ago. Heenan as usual won the audience over quickly with his face-splitting grin, laddish charm and bizarre Arnold Schwarznegger impersonations. He has mastered the art of taking whatever the audience throws at him and adapting his material to make it seem completely off the cuff and applicable. And on this evening he was quick to realise that what every comedy show needs is an enormous shaven-headed publican who looks like he’s about to kill you sitting right in the middle of the front row.

Niall Browne is a Northern Irish comedian now resident in Scotland, and is in many ways a bit of an old fashioned gag-smith. Homely and cheery, he is one of those performers whose act sort of breezes over you in a great big waft of good will. His material is good, and ideas like randomly choosing Olympic competitors in the manner of juries were very funny, but the only time he moves towards any kind of edginess is when he talks about what it was like growing up in his homeland. He takes to the stage on this occasion with his arm in a sling, a fact he refers only briefly and that I thought he could have made a lot more of. Overall his was an entertaining performance, but not a terribly memorable one.

Jay Lafferty is one of the up-and-coming young stars of the Scottish scene at the moment, and it doesn’t hurt that she is also a bit of a babe. This isn’t the only thing about her that draws the male attention, however, as she opens her act with a routine which provides a perfect explanation of the offside rule using shopping as a metaphor. Bright and bubbly, she combines a girly style of delivery with a sometimes unexpectedly twisted mind, and on the evidence of this set it won’t be long before she is moving up from the ten minute try-out spot to become a regular support.

Dan Evans is a name I had heard bandied about a lot, he’s a comedian’s comedian, widely known and appreciated by others in the business. I have to say my first impression of him was as Harry Hill without the collar, and for much of the act his mannerisms, and indeed the bald head, did little to dispel that image. But that is not meant in any way as a criticism, because Evans brand of surreal stream of consciousness humour is sharp and original, his jokes never obvious, and his delivery is assured and confident.

Dave Fulton is an American comic who has been resident in the UK for some years, and as with many of his countrymen living over here, his act revolves in a large part around a critique of his home country. With long straggly hair and a laid-back demeanour he comes over as something of a stoner dude, and indeed probably is, but this is belied by his sometimes savage cutting to the point.

That said, as a political comedian, which he would clearly like to be, he is sometimes slightly lacking, and for instance attacks on President Bush would seem slightly lazy and not a bit pointless at this moment in time. It’s not as if there’s anyone in the audience thinking “I thought he was doing a good job.” He’s on safer ground when he sticks to the personal, such as his examination of the difference in attitudes to drinking between his homeland and his adopted country.

But Fulton is an old hand and has plenty of experience and plenty of material to keep an audience entertained for a forty minute set. And if he isn’t necessarily as “cutting edge” as some of his contemporaries, not everybody has to be.

Scott Capurro, Teddy, Juliet Meyers, Jim Park, compere Vladimir McTavish - The Stand, Edinburgh, 10/04/2008

They say that familiarity breeds contempt, but this was a night that proved that old adage wrong. On the bill there was only one comedian that I had not seen before, and of the others, none I had last seen more than six months ago, two of them twice within that time. In all honesty, I might have given the show a miss if I hadn’t had been taking a visitor along. But in the end I’m glad not to have.

Vladimir McTavish, it has to be said, is a funny man, but is no MC. His curmudgeonly style is not exactly the best way to get an audience warmed up, and his interaction with that audience leaves a bit to be desired. Beyond a cursory introduction, he makes no great attempt to get to know any of their stories, instead content for the most part to cherry-pick from his large store of material and get the laughs going that way. He did a competent job, but I would prefer to see him as an act rather than performing this role in the future.

First on for the night was Juliet Meyers, the one new name for me. A middle-aged, Jewish and a bit of an aging hippie, she was a bundle of enthusiasm and energy from the word go. Again, as an opening act I would say she did what was required, but she isn’t someone I would particularly seek out again. It was something of a workmanlike performance. Very much a gag-teller, she was funny, but her material was mostly quite obvious and the punchlines were often slightly telegraphed.

Jim Park I have reviewed here twice before, and on both occasions I have been less than enthusiastic. So I’m actually quite pleased this time to be able to say that he is growing on me. With new material in the set, he had re-jigged the best of his older lines into a snappy opening few minutes that had a great rhythm and delivered the laughs well, and the new jokes, when they arrived, were equally strong. Meanwhile the air of vague bewilderment with which he performs disarms the audience and makes him easy to warm to.

Teddy, who followed, I had been equally dismissive of in my last review, and again I can only report a change of opinion. Even though he performed, for the most part, the same material, centred on a lengthy shaggy-dog story about a sexual encounter with the woman of his dreams which turned into a bit of a nightmare, he has clearly been busy trimming and honing the performance in the meantime. As a result, some of the more gratuitous crudeness had been stripped away, and the more bizarre and surreal moments had been highlighted making for a set that was not merely improved, but actually sounded fresher on this occasion than on first hearing it.

And talking of gratuitous crudeness, Scott Capurro is the master of that particular art-form. Seeming to get taller and skinnier every time I see him, the camp San Franciscan could read the phone book and make it sound pornographic. There’s a famous quote by George Carlin that the job of a comedian is to find out where the line is and then cross it, and this is something Capurro seems to have taken very much to heart. He is not a comedian for the faint hearted, as he gleefully pushes and pushes his audience to see how far he can bend them before they will break.

Nothing is off-limits in one of Capurro’s shows, as he runs the gamut of racial and sexual stereotypes, but always if you listen close enough it becomes clear that the butt of the joke is actually ourselves and our own highly-strung middle-class attitudes to these subjects. The basis of his humour is always that people want to tell you what it is and is not acceptable to joke about, without first stopping to consider what it is that they find offensive about it. That most people just hear the key-word and say “you can’t say that,” without listening to the context in which the word is being said. Capurro makes you listen and he makes you think, and he makes you laugh at the same time, and that’s really what all good comedy should be about.

King Gong - The Comedy Store, London

One of the best things about moving out of the middle of nowhere and closer to "The City" is the improved ease of going to an event just because you fell like it, without needing to plan things in advance or worry about getting home again afterwards. Therefore, when I was wandering around Leicester square the other evening and happened to walk past the comedy store, I decided to pop in and see what things were like. The evening's event was a "Beat the Gong" event, something that I had never been to before, and wasn't sure what to expect from it.

For others who have never experienced a Gong show before, it's a fairly simple concept. The wannabe comedians have to survive on stage for 5 minutes without being gonged off. They can be gonged off by the MC for time wasting, or a number of other petty misdemeanours, but the main power to gong someone off lies in the hands of the audience. Three random people were selected from the crowd and issued with red cards, if all three red cards go up in the air, the wannabe is gonged.

Surviving the full time on stage is a difficult thing to do: five minutes is a long time in comedy and the audience is a fickle mistress. On this particular night only five of the 20+ to take the stage managed to avoid the gong, and that was despite a couple of comedians who, at the request of the audience, were given second (and in one case third) chances. Of those that made it through, the audience then selected it's ultimate favourite who will go on to other things.

A good MC for the night is crucial to keep everything working and keep the audience laughing. This particular night, the MC was Ben Norris and he did a fantastic job. When I spoke to a few people in the crowd, people seemed to be of the opinion that they would quite happily have paid the £5 entrance just for his bits...all the other would be comedians were a bonus.

As a note to anyone who likes the idea of taking part in a gong event: it's a great place to try and find out if you have the makings of a comedian, and build up some stage confidence. But, don't insult the audience, don't make references to the inner workings of the body (male or female) and don't be too vulgar (crude and rude is fine, but careful with the vulgarity). But the most important thing: there are three judges in the audience at any time, don't be put off because one doesn't like you. too many of the acts had one red card against them, reacted defensively to this and floundered a bit...and that caused the other two cards to go up. Ignore the cards, focus on general audience opinion instead.

All in all, a gong show is a good night out, but don't expect the kind of quality of humour you'd get from a more traditional show.

Steve Hughes, Chris Lynam, Mark Nelson, Isma Almas, compere Bruce Devlin - The Stand, Edinburgh, 04/04/2008

Some nights... just turn out to be a little bit bizarre. I probably should have realised that this was going to be one of them when we spotted the chap sitting in the front row wearing cricket pads and gloves and drinking Magners cider from the bottle through a straw that was actually a bat grip filled with ice. As can be imagined, it didn’t take MC Bruce Devlin more than, oh, about two thousandths of a second to spot and home in on him like a sniper with a laser sight.

As it turns out this is only one of three stag and hen parties in the room on this particular night, which gives Devlin plenty of material to exercise his trademark bitchy camp humour on. As circumstances had forced us into the front row, I was glad of this as it meant that I escaped, at this juncture at least, relatively lightly.

But anyway, the evening started off okay, indeed rather well. Opening act Mark Nelson won Scottish Comedian of the Year two years ago, and he showed why with an excellent performance which combined a very dry wit and some caustic one-liners with a great deal of warmer self-deprecating humour. A regular fixture on the Scottish stand-up circuit, on this performance I can’t imagine it will be long before he enjoys success on a more national scale. A good opener, and a mental image of Heather Mills that will stay with me a long time.

Things started to turn weird, however, when Isma Almas took to the stage clad head to foot in traditional Islamic jilbab and burkha, and proceeded to have a lot of fun with the sheer ridiculous nature of trying to do comedy with nothing showing, at one point setting off a set of Christmas fairy lights so that her costume flashed a variety of colours. She had some good moments, both before and after she removed the strange attire, but overall I felt she telegraphed her jokes a little too much, and maybe needs a bit more stage time to become the finished article.

And then there was Chris Lynam. What to say about this act? Clearly influenced by the likes of Freddie Starr and Max Wall, with maybe a little of Rick and Ade thrown in, Lynam’s act does not contain, to the best of my recollection, a single line of dialogue that could be described as a joke. Rather he simply acts bizarrely for twenty minutes before exiting the stage. Entering it with a babble of nonsense, during his routine he throws ice cubes at people’s heads, dresses in a sparkly evening dress and smears melted chocolate over himself, and at one point, steals my shoe, throws it around the room and then attempts to auction it to the audience. Overall it is comedy of discomfort, and the laughter that eventually arrives is more to do with a general build up of absurdness than through any part of the performance that is individually funny.

So finally on to Steve Hughes, and it is only a few months since I last reviewed his headline act, but in the meantime he seems to have been busy adding new material to his act, as around half the set was new to me despite having seen him several times before. As usual with Hughes, it’s mostly a mixture of politics, satire and paranoia, lengthy ramblings on how every aspect of our lives are controlled by the commercial interests of the super-rich military-industrial complex cabals, but with a few knob gags thrown in just to lighten the load.

Reverend Obadiah Steppenwolf III, Gary Little, Chris Forbes, Ailsa Johnston, compere Craig Hill - The Stand, Edinburgh, 20/03/2008

It’s a strange situation when you go to a comedy night and the MC is the biggest draw on the bill. Although less well known south of the border, Craig Hill (pictured) is something of a star name in his native Scotland. In fact, he was well known even before he was famous, such that here in Edinburgh people still remember him as the assistant at one of the Royal Mile souvenir shops who regularly accosted elderly American female tourists with free samples of shortbread by asking them if he could “tempt them with a finger.”

But since finding television fame on BBC2’s “Live Floor Show,” Craig has never looked back and is now a regular on local TV and radio. A natural entertainer, almost a force of nature, he bursts onto the stage with the energy of several atom bombs, resplendent in muscle shirt and army camouflage kilt, performing a gyrating hi-energi dance to Jackie Wilson’s Reet Petite, and generally camping it up so that you would be forgiven for mistaking him for the secret love child of Liberace and Danny LaRue.

Craig could be the perfect compere, he has the ability to have any audience eating out of his hands within minutes of taking to the stage. His only problem is a tendency to overshadow the other acts on the bill. But that isn’t a problem for the audience, as evidenced when he asked a middle-aged guest house owner in the front row who had never been to a comedy show before why he chose this as his first one, and received the pointed answer, “because of you.”

Another unusual aspect of this particular night at The Stand was that the entire bill was exclusively Scottish. The first act was Chris Forbes, a young comic from Bridge of Weir, whose set, I have to say, was variable. He was entertaining enough, as such, but doing the opening spot, I got the distinct impression that he had not long stepped up to this level, and was trying to stretch material that wasn’t quite enough to fill the allotted stage time. His opening was sound enough, a pedantic examination of a New Scientist article on environmentally friendly arms trading. But by the end of the set he was giving the audience rather too graphic descriptions of his bowel movements, which in all honesty smacked a little of desperation.

I wasn’t overly impressed with Ailsa Johnston either, but I think that may have been more my problem than hers. The best comedy comes from recognition of the situation, and Johnson, groomed up to the nines with more make-up than an air stewardess and a fake tan that could blind at ninety paces, based most of her humour around the experience of being the kind of girl whose interests in life are clubbing and shagging and whose cultural heroes are Jordan and Jodie Marsh. It all seemed to go down well in certain sections of the room, but I’m afraid it left me stone cold.

Things improved somewhat when Gary Little took the stage. An old hand at this game now, and one of those comics that you would know by sight even if you didn’t recognise the name, Little clearly has a wealth of material from which to pick and choose. But even here things were a little off, and as a lengthy routine about a lads stag party trip to Auschwitz, which promised great things, fizzled out without anything resembling a punchline, it seemed to me like the whole night was starting to feel a little flat.

Maybe at such times, that’s when you need a little old time religion to see you right. And if you can’t get any of that, the Reverend Obadiah Steppenwolf III will have to do as a substitute. A character based act, the creation of comic Jim Muir, the good reverend staggers onto the stage in a grubby white suit, beer bottle clutched in each hand, and rips into the miserable sinners gathered before him with the brain-addled logic of a wino. In all honesty, hiding behind this persona is mainly an excuse for Muir to spend the majority of his stage time hurling abuse out into the audience, but he does it so well that it is enough.

Perhaps it was just that Steppenwolf is one of the few acts around with a personality big enough to stand up alongside our Craig (bless his little cotton socks.) But it rounded off the evening perfectly, and left the impression of a night which, if it wasn’t among the best of Stand experiences, was at least good enough.

Dwight Slade - The Stand, Edinburgh, 18/03/2008

It can’t be easy living in the shadow of genius. To most people, if they know of Dwight Slade at all, it is as Bill Hicks’ best friend and former writing partner. Even now, fourteen years after his death and more than a quarter of a century after they went their separate ways, it is still a role he is defined by, so much so that he even makes oblique reference to the fact in his own introduction. Yet the truth is, Slade has been out on his own since well before Hicks’ rise to prominence, and if he hasn’t quite reached the same level of eminence, he has at least made it to somewhere near the top of the comedy tree, not through association, but on his own merits.

This was his last performance in Europe before heading back to his home in Seattle the next day, and for an artist more used to performing on big stages and Comedy Central TV specials, maybe a wet Tuesday night in a basement in Scotland might have seemed something of a comedown. But if so, it didn’t show, and though his name might not mean so much on this side of the Atlantic, for those in the know, a decent sized crowd including Scottish TV comedian Craig Hill, it was a rare chance to see one of America’s brightest talents at work at close quarters.

Like Hicks, Slade’s comedy is mostly based on being slightly pissed off with the stupidity of the world. But where they differ is that Slade clearly still cares whether or not the audience like him at the end of the show. He never quite goes for the jugular, careful not to cross over that line of making his audience feel uncomfortable. But nonetheless, he has a wealth of strong material to draw on, and surely one of the advantages for a US based comedian playing over here is that he can pick and choose the best parts of many years worth of shows, secure in the knowledge that he has an audience coming to it with fresh ears.

Occasionally this doesn’t quite work. Performing material about having just had his fortieth birthday, for instance, seems slightly incongruous when you do the maths and realise he has to be closer to fifty, but what it does do is allow him to perform for a full two hours without ever running out of steam or suffering any serious dip in quality.

The overriding theme of the show is that of the difference between rational and irrational behaviour, characterised by those who listen to the Evil Monkey which sits on your shoulder telling you to do all the things you really want to do but know you shouldn’t. Much of this focusing on the general self-absorbed behaviour of others, from people with hands free phones shouting in the supermarket to the guy on the plane rubbing his backside against your face while trying to fit his baggage in the overhead locker. And most of it results in the object of his fury meeting with a violent response at the sharp end of his imaginary pool-cue.

Meanwhile, the highlight of the show is a five minute set-piece mime in which Slade demonstrates to the audience why car radios are a far greater hazard to the road user than alcohol. Contorting his body as he tunes from station to station, each song provoking an exaggerated response from headbanging to disco dancing, it’s clearly a well rehearsed routine honed to perfection.

Slade is an infrequent visitor to our country, but luckily for us he enjoys coming here because it allows him to say the things he can’t get away with in his native land. So hopefully it won’t be too long before he feels the need to let off steam on our shores once again. When he does, seek him out, because you will find it well worth the effort.

Jo Caulfield, Wilson Dixon, Donnchadh O'Conaill, Andrew O'Neill, compere Sandy Nelson - The Stand, Edinburgh, 15/03/2008

Saturday nights at the Stand can usually command a pretty strong line-up, but it has to be said that this was one of the strongest. When even the ten minute spot is occupied by a recognisable name comedian, you know you are onto a winner.

The quality showed right from the very beginning, as Sandy Nelson proved himself to be a quite excellent MC with just the right qualities needed for that job. He knows exactly when to push and when to hold back, and exactly where the line is to keep the audience on his side and having a good time. On this evening his job is made much easier by a family from Livingstone on the front row out to celebrate their daughter’s particular milestone birthday which she really didn’t want discussed.

Donnchadh O’Conaill’s job as the opening act was not made easy by a disturbance going on to one side of the club which resulted in some patrons being ejected. But he dealt with the matter well, and with humour, and while his set wasn’t the brightest of the night, he nonetheless gave a good account of himself. A gangly blonde-haired Irishman, his slow-paced, downbeat humour was mainly based in his own social awkwardness. But if that sounds depressing, it’s the care with which he has put his set together with a marvellous mastery of wordplay that ensures that it isn’t. Relatively new to the scene, after winning the Chortle Student Comedy award two years ago, he isn’t the finished article quite yet. But he shows enough to be able to predict that he eventually will be.

It was strange seeing Andrew O’Neill, now a battle-hardened Fringe veteran of many years’ standing, in the slot usually reserved for relative newcomers. But in a way it was a good spot for him, because it forced him to tighten up his usually surreal and meandering monologues which can take a while for an audience to get into. He still produced a number of his bizarre trademark asides, bursting onto the stage with a song about a hot bus. But his bizarre goth appearance tells the audience straight away not to expect straightforward humour, and spending most of his set discussing the problems of being a heterosexual transvestite, while certainly unconventional, seems to work very well.

The slight leftfield approach to the evening continued into Wilson Dixon’s set. Dixon is a musical comedian with a character based set. With an improbably large ten gallon hat and obviously fake long hair, he introduces himself as a country singer from Cripple Creek in the Rocky Mountains, and frequently relies for laughs on wrong-footing the audience, setting up jokes so you think you know where they are heading before sending them in totally unexpected directions for the punchline. Between the songs his softly spoken drawl is sometimes a little hard to hear, but it is worth listening to.

Jo Caulfield has, over the last decade, become one of the most successful and instantly recognised female comics in the country. Known for her frequent appearances on panel shows such as Mock the Week and HIGNFY, she also has her own Radio 4 series, and was head writer for So Graham Norton. All of which is merely background to the fact that she is also a damned fine stand-up.

Her comedy has always been slightly barbed, that of a person irritated that the world is mostly populated by dimwits, and she adopts a style where she is your acerbic best friend embarking with you on a marathon bitching session. And of course it works because, for the most part, we agree with every word she says. However, there was a sense in the show that this was a case of getting a bit more mileage out of last year’s material before developing a new show in time for the Fringe, and some sections felt a little dated. It could be said to be a bit lazy to still be doing gags about John Smeaton and the Glasgow airport attack a year on.

That said, for the most part the set had a little bit for everyone, using a general scattergun approach, and she is a hard act not to warm to. And after three slightly unconventional acts, it was probably best to end with a safe pair of hands, with the overall result of a highly successful night all round.

I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue - Wales Millenium Centre, Cardiff 14/03/08

I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue has been a one of the nations favourite comedy radio shows for over 35 years, since its creation in 1972. During the course of its time at the BBC 50 series have been recorded and tickets to see recordings of the radio show can sell out huge venues within hours and without advertising.

The show grew out of an earlier radio show called I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again, a show where the characters would get up to madcap mischievous adventures full of marvellously bad word play. Clue, described as the "antidote to panel games", provided a platform for the same humour, but without the need for a script!

People are now being given a greater opportunity to see the show, as the panel Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden, Barry Cryer and frequent guest Jeremy Hardy have taken the show on its first ever national tour.

The live show with Humphrey Lyttelton obviously in the chair and the nations favourite ivory tinkler, Colin Sell, at the piano, contains many of the favourite games from the radio including Sound Charades, New Definitions (aka entries for the Uxbridge English Dictionary), One Song to the Tune of the Other, and Mornington Crescent. And while the show is primarily based around the spoken, actually seeing the show gives it a whole extra dimension, especially in the sound effects rounds.

The show is currently in the second leg of its first UK tour and getting tickets to any of the remaining shows is likely to prove difficult, but the show is a gem and likely to tour again, given the reception it has received. Keep your eyes peeled!

Jason Cook, Stu and Garry, Vladimir McTavish, Antony Murray, compere Ro Campbell - The Stand, Edinburgh, 12/03/2008

A charity show is always a difficult one to review, because you are aware that the acts on the bill are all giving their time for free to raise money for a good cause. Obviously this is a laudable act, and thus any criticism of them makes you feel like you are kicking a puppy just a little bit. However, like any comedy night, this benefit on behalf of the First Step Community Project, a group who provide support to children growing up in difficult circumstances, had its good moments and some not so good.

Compere Ro Campbell is an excitable and slightly brash Australian for whom, it has to be said, the role doesn’t show him in his best light. He does the job sufficiently, but doesn’t show the spark that the best MC’s display. He runs through the usual “where are you from, what do you do” routine, but never manages to extract the comedy gold. On the other hand, when he moves on to parts of his set material, he begins to shine, and there are a few moments of brilliance, especially while recounting tales of his days as “the man who holds the Golf Sale sign.”

First up for the night was Antony Murray, a tall and slightly geeky Scotsman whose set is mostly based around perceived social inadequacy and intellectual unhipness. He does a decent job, but is something of a slow burn comic and as such probably isn’t right for the opening spot which really needs someone who is going to hit the stage and make an impact.

Vladimir McTavish follows him, and it is interesting to see someone who would normally be the headline act performing in a short early bill spot. Much of his set was familiar from seeing him only a few weeks before, but there was a bit of new stuff thrown in, suggesting he is starting to road test new material ready for the summer. Either way, he is always a solid and popular performer and he set up the rest of the night well.

Stu and Garry are the Stand’s resident improvisational double act, and have been working together so long that they are totally comfortable with each other and the situation. Complementing each other well, the tall skinny Garry Dobson with long hair and improbably long chin beard is the flighty, slightly weird one, while short and stocky Stuart Murphy is the cheeky overgrown schoolboy. They run through a series of familiar “Whose Line Is It Anyway” type games, creating bizarre situations from audience suggestions, which results in such unlikely situations as a row in a gay partnership performed as an opera.

Top of the bill, Jason Cook until recently would have been better known as one half of the novelty German Electronic Industrial Rock send-up act Die Clattershenkenfietermaus. But in the past year he has been making a name for himself with his excellent “My Confessions” show, which he had actually been performing in the Glasgow Comedy Festival earlier that evening before rushing over to the capital to put in his appearance. His set was a mixture of material from that show, which I saw last summer, together with some new observations, mostly based around the idea that he is his own worst enemy and the inner voices that most of us try not to listen to usually get the better of him. With the more poignant moments removed, the material doesn’t have the same emotional impact as the full Confessions show, but Cook still retains the Geordie charm that allows him to get away with telling horrible stories about himself and yet remaining somehow loveable.

Toby Hadoke - Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf

Toby Hadoke's stand up show based around his love of Doctor Who is something that I have been meaning to see since I was in Edinburgh two years ago, and caught a few glimpses of him as he took part in an afternoon sketch show called "Soup" upstairs in the Café Royal. At the time he was performing Moths in the evenings, but had revealed his astonishing memory and passion for the doctor briefly during one performance of Soup. Toby is an accomplished comedian, has appeared on various things of stage and screen that may explain why you think he's slightly familiar, and also manages and compères XS Malarkey, the Manchester comedy club.

The show Moths Ate My "Doctor Who" Scarf, which has also been recorded for radio, is perfect for those who love the Doctor as well as for those who barely know the show. Toby tells the story of the Doctor, but also tells the story of a kid who was a bit of an outsider finding something special, of a man becoming a father, of politics past and present...the stories are both touching and funny.
Mostly though, the show is a chance for Doctor Who fans to relive a lot of memories and for fans and non fans alike to laugh a lot and have a thoroughly enjoyable evening.

(The fact that this particular show was in Cardiff, and the theatre right next to Torchwood, added an extra geeky joy to the evening.)

Natalie Haynes, Susan Calman - The Stand, Edinburgh, 04/03/2008

Officially, this was billed as a “Wicked Wenches Special” to tie in with the club’s monthly night dedicated to female comedians. In reality, however, it was essentially a stop off in Natalie Haynes latest club tour with Susan Calman, billed as MC but actually serving as more of a support act.

The diminutive Ms Calman opened up the evening with a set of around half an hour, starting with the usual MC type “chatting to the front row” duties, served well on this night by the fact that it seemed to be almost entirely occupied by upper middle-class Edinburgh University students, including the impossibly posh “Flick” whose cut-glass vowels led Calman to suggest recreating “The Running Man” by dropping her off in the middle of George Square in Glasgow and seeing how far she could get.

She proves herself an accomplished compere, but if I have a criticism, it is that she probably did a little too much of the audience interaction, on a night that didn’t really need it. On a usual club night it would have been fine, but on this occasion, most people had come specifically to see a “name” comedian and didn’t necessarily need so much warming up. So it might have been nice to see more of her set material, because when it came it was very good, particularly her routine on what a crap superhero she would make.

It seems strange that Natalie Haynes has now been performing comedy for over a decade, because when she started out it was still very much a male dominated field, and the few females able to make it usually had to do so by compromising their femininity. So it can’t have been an easy task for a relatively well-balanced, Cambridge educated and, let’s not beat about the bush, rather easy on the eye woman to try to break into that world. But break into it she did, becoming in the process not only a well respected headline act, but winning herself regular TV and radio work as well as a gig as a columnist for The Times into the bargain.

Haynes charm lies in a slightly warped world view combined with a liberal sprinkling of nerdishness. There are few stand-up shows you can attend, for instance, where it helps to have a comprehensive knowledge of US daytime detective shows Monk, Murder She Wrote and Diagnosis: Murder. Not that it’s essential, you understand, but it does help. These, together with a thorough deconstruction of the plot of Logan’s Run do form a sizeable segment of the show.

We are also treated to a lesson in Latin grammar demonstrating very conclusively why the “C” word is actually far more pleasant than the “V” word when referring to female genitalia, which bizarrely leads to an explanation of why Pythagoras probably got more than his fair share of chicks. And in less random moments she explains to us the etiquette of swimming-pool bullying, the fact that she turned down the opportunity to torture fellow vegetarians in order to entertain us, the moral implications of buying Ikea furniture, and how IQ is related to pram size.

Haynes performance seems effortless, but is often delivered at such breakneck speed that you find yourself marvelling that her mind manages to keep pace with her mouth. Like the best comics she manages to take huge circular digressions without ever losing the thread of the show. And although she fits more material into an hour and a quarter than some manage in an entire career, still the time seems almost too short and you would happily go on listening to her skewed logic all night.

Vladimir McTavish, Joe Heenan, Padraig Hyland, Jack Whitehall, compere Susan Morrison – The Stand, Edinburgh, 22/02/2008

One of the impressive things about The Stand is that they don’t merely put on good comedy nights, they also work hard to develop the local comedy scene. It’s an important service in an industry which is so focussed on London that comics in other parts of the country can often be isolated and find it difficult to get exposure. This night featured three comics who had come through the ranks to become regulars at the club, and have been able to use that as a springboard to bookings nationwide.

Fast talking Glaswegian Susan Morrison is a regular MC at the club, and it’s a role she has learned to fill superbly well. On this night, with the entire front row occupied by a stag party, she had plenty of material to work with, and unlike some comperes she doesn’t pussyfoot around but jumps straight in with both feet. Brash, brassy and bottle-blonde may just be the perfect combination for a female host, her patter is bold and innuendo-laden but she never loses control of her audience.

The importance of a good MC is highlighted when one of the acts is below par, and I’m going to give Padraig Hyland the benefit of the doubt here, he has a good reputation and has reached a certain level of success but he would probably be the first to admit that his performance on this night was not good. It didn’t help that a heckle within the first minute provided a punchline to a joke that was funnier than the one Hyland himself eventually produced. He never seemed to recover from that moment and, despite a good line here or there, for most of his set he seemed to be struggling to remember his lines and frequently losing his thread, and some parts of his set were notable only for an embarrassed silence.

No such problems for Jack Whitehall however. The standard setup for a weekend night at The Stand sees a headliner, two established comics and someone new, young and fairly unknown in the ten minute try out spot. It is rare that the occupant of that ten minute spot turns out to be the best act of the night. I don’t think I’d be sticking my neck out very far in predicting that within a few years Whitehall will be coming back to headline nights like these. His opening disclaimer about his middle-class upbringing worried me for a moment, when a comic opens with an apology it is often a sign he isn’t confident in his own material. But within a minute all such worries had fallen away as he demonstrated a superb command of the English Language and a talent for brilliant social mimicry.

Joe Heenan has become very much a Stand regular, and the probably the most apt word to apply to him is “dependable.” Very much a blokish comic, he looks and sounds like someone you could enjoy a pint with, and he is adept at very quickly bringing an audience onto his side. Moreover, you get the impression from watching him that his act is not meticulously planned in advance, rather that he has a wealth of material to draw on and an ability to think fast on his feet and tailor the set to the particular audience he is faced with. Whether the case or not, his was a safe pair of hands to keep the momentum of the night going.

Vladimir McTavish is a brash, straight-talking Glaswegian schemie who is the comic invention of Paul Sneddon, a comedian also responsible for the drunken football pundit Bob Doolally. Originally created to present an alternative Scottish history lesson, McTavish has now become pretty much Sneddon’s main business and he tours extensively under the name. His humour is from the streets, often coarse and presented in an aggressive style. Most of his set is based around the Scottish experience, from Burns suppers to the smoking ban and hatred of the English, and in truth he mainly picks easy targets. It was an entertaining enough end to the night, but maybe slightly disappointing as a headline act having failed to surpass the two acts which preceded him.