Juliet Meyers, Holly Walsh, Liz Bentley, Rosie Wilby, compere Maureen Younger - The Bath House, Soho, 04/09/2008

When it comes to stand-up comedy, you know you’re in trouble when you turn up to the venue to discover the show’s being held up on your account. Cursing the queue at Viet that delayed our arrival, we take the full brunt of regular Laughing Cows compere Maureen Younger’s playfully aggressive questioning, but there’s plenty of other grist to her mill sat around us, not least a professional film extra called Brian with a most extraordinary quiff who tries to give as good as he gets.

First up is Rosie Wilby, who started out as a musician and fell into comedy when she realised her between-song banter was getting a better response than the songs themselves. There are some clever moments in her set – not least the bit about her fear of being out collecting one parcel when Royal Mail try to deliver another, thus ending up in a weird kind of postal groundhog day – and her self-deprecating humour is largely well received, but it’s a shame the sometime MC for Glastonbury’s Leftfield Stage hurries some of her darker thoughts as if reluctant to let them sink into and fester in the minds of the audience.

Liz Bentley also ended up in comedy via a circuitous route, having tried her hand at novel-writing and then discovering that her short stories elicited more than just a few laughs when read aloud at open mic nights. In fact, the confident sit-down stand-up opens up by denying she’s a comedian at all, describing herself as a poet instead – albeit a poet who performed in a swimming pool at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. A keyboard-led ditty about a tenants’ association meeting is probably the highlight, though later Younger’s right in noting that we probably hadn’t come out expecting to join in a sprightly singalong about breastfeeding.

The pick of tonight’s bunch, though, is Holly Walsh, by some way (I’d guess) the youngest. Dressed in a blue anorak and looking, in her own words, like “a gardener”, she has a nicely unstudied style (or at least a style so studied it’s been made to look unstudied). Not only does she cope swiftly, easily and wittily with being picked up on geographical distinctions in East London – “It’s like being heckled by a sat nav” – she also comes out with the evening’s most memorable and repeatable punchline: “That’s midwifery!” (I leave you to speculate as to the joke it belonged to). Little wonder, then, that she was named 2008’s Best Newcomer by Chortle, and we’re left wanting more than her allotted fifteen minutes.

Like Liz Bentley, Juliet Meyers is fresh from Edinburgh, where one night she performed her show ‘Strange Ears’ to just three people, one of whom happened to be a Chortle reviewer. Thankfully there are too many of us tonight for her to feel she needs to know everyone’s name, though she does hark back to her Edinburgh experience by recalling what happened when she told the (very Scottish) mother of a young boy who’d come to her show that it contained use of the ‘C’ word – the woman looked down at her son and said, “David, you know ‘cunt’, don’t you?” Whereas Rosie Wilby races through anything remotely controversial, Meyers pauses to make a tumbleweed noise after her edgier jokes as though to draw more attention to them (unnecessarily). Her best routine is based around that idea that one little untruth can snowball out of control, beginning with her confession that she often refers to herself as “Mrs” so as to avoid the potential social embarrassment of “Ms” and ending with her realisation that she’s invented a husband who’s a bearded accountant called Tim.

The first Thursday of the month, then: the night for lady-shaped laughs...

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.