Since winning So You Think You're Funny seven years ago, Miles Jupp has gone about having a quietly successful career combining stand-up with acting roles, most notably probably as Archie the Inventor in the BBC children's series Balamory.
Most of his stand-up career has been as a kind of character act, albeit the character being essentially himself, a "nice but dim" upper-middle class, slightly out of touch with the real world ditherer. His appearance, the unfashionable spectacles, wilfully unstylish wild curly hair, puppy-fat face and twenty years out of fashion clothing, has always added to and enhanced this persona, almost a shorthand for what was going to come.
So when he bounded onto the stage for this performance, looking fit and trim, contacts firmly in place, short-haired, trendy bearded and wearing well cut jeans and a casual shirt, it took a moment to realise that some random stranger hadn't just wandered into the wrong gig.
But that was a good thing, because it meant that Jupp had nothing to fall back on, no easy crutch, and had to rely on his own wit and personality only to carry the show. And for the most part, he did just that.
This is occasionally a hit and miss show. Jupp tells long rambling stories, some of which work superbly well, but others seem to fizzle out with nary a final punchline in sight. For instance, his tale of testicular trauma had the audience virtually rolling in the aisles, but the following story, involving a dead dog, just went nowhere and left you wondering what exactly the point he was trying to make had been. Later, on the other hand, he shows himself to be a man after my own heart with a lengthy rant on the state of the British railway system that is absolutely spot-on.
But with the main weapon in his arsenal, his easy public school charm, present and intact, he is an impossible act not to warm to, and as such an hour in his company passes comfortably. While it probably won't be the most laugh-out-loud show you will see all through the Fringe, it is definitely worth checking out if you want to be left with a warm and fuzzy feeling inside.
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.
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.)
Partly because it's gone a bit quiet on here, and partly because I'm feeling guilty at having contributed very little since the site's inception, here's a post that went up on my own site last summer all about Cardiff's premier champions of stand-up comedy, Go Faster Stripe.
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Over the last year and a half, I've written a great deal about what seems to me to be the wealth of musical talent to which Cardiff is home. But it's important to point out that there are many other creative enterprises going on in the city, all deserving of promotion and wider attention. One such enterprise is Go Faster Stripe.
At a time when only the biggest comedians - Peter Kay, Ricky Gervais - seem to get the opportunity to record DVDs (which subsequently sell by the bucketload), the Go Faster Stripe team invite top-class stand-ups to perform in front of live audiences at Chapter and have the performances recorded for sale online. Not only does this mean that Cardiff is suddenly attracting some bigger names - I've seen Stewart Lee, Richard Herring and Robin Ince at Go Faster Stripe gigs - but it has also ensured that whole shows haven't passed into history unrecorded. That foresight and generosity should be applauded.
Fresh from a scouting mission to the Edinburgh Festival, GFS's Chris Evans was kind enough to find time to tell me a bit more...
How did Go Faster Stripe come about?
"I read on Stewart Lee's website that he was sad that his show '90s Comedian' was not going to be recorded. He'd tried to give it away to late night satellite channels, and no one was interested. I was sad about this too. And then I remembered I've got a few mates that know one end of a camera from the other, so I wrote to Stew and told him. We recorded the show, and it surprised everyone when it came out rather well."
What inspired and / or continues to inspire you?
"People in any walk of life that follow their heart, rather than money. In the comedy world, it's the comedians who are doing something new with the artform. And they do this even though they remain at the sidelines of the business."
How many people are involved in the work of putting together each DVD?
"There's five of us at the recordings - two cameramen, a stills photographer, a sound guy and me. Chapter supply a couple of staff to collect tickets and operate the lighting. Once we've got the show, we've an editor who makes what we've recorded look lovely. And then there's the sleeve designer, who also does our adverts - although he's the still photographer too, so I don't know if that count as another person. Finally, my girlfriend packs up the orders that we get through our website."
Which has been your favourite DVD to record so far?
"I've only asked people that I love - so I couldn't possibly pick one. They are all magnificent."
Who would you most like to work with?
"I think it might be interesting to work with a much bigger name - someone that is - or at least has - had a big DVD produced for them. I think the way we record stuff is often more powerful as we record it in a more intimate setting."
What are the plans for the future? Any new releases on the horizon?
"There's an unstoppable machine in action. We've got new DVDs coming out from Simon Munnery, Robin Ince, and another from Richard Herring. These are all in the can, and are at various stages of post-production. And in September [8th, at Chapter], we are filming a show with Lucy Porter, which will be lovely."
Great to see a venture like this snowballing. Thanks to Chris for his time, and best wishes to the team for the future.
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Since the interview, the Simon Munnery, Richard Herring and Lucy Porter DVDs have all come out (not quite sure what happened to the Robin Ince one), and their new release is Wil Hodgson's 'Skinheads, Readers' Wives And My Little Ponies'. Plans are afoot for them to branch out into publishing, too, with a book of the first six months of Herring's blog Warming Up in the pipeline.
For comedy fans the world over, the death of George Carlin on Sunday, at the age of 71, in Santa Monica, California, severed the last link with a generation of comics who changed the face of comedy forever.
Carlin was one of the greats. There is no doubt about that. His influence on those who followed, from Robin Williams to Jerry Seinfeld to Bill Hicks, is undeniable. What is equally undeniable is that he was unique, one of a kind, and one of the few comedians who remained a vital and original force in comedy right up until his dying day.
Born in New York on May 12th 1937, Carlin was the son of middle-class Roman Catholic parents, of Irish descent. He was raised by his mother after his parents split up, and left school at the age of 14. Joining the US Air Force, he served as a radar technician, but by his own account was seldom out of trouble. While serving, he began to work as a disk jockey on the side, and after his discharge in 1957 he continued in this line of work, taking a job at a radio station in Fort Worth, Texas.
While working for the station he met Jack Burns, and the two became close friends, and later formed a comedy double-act. The comedy was of the traditional style of the time, straightforward gags performed wearing suits for a mostly middle-class or business type audience. They were successful and, quitting the radio station, took the act on the road. Then in 1962, while the pair were performing in Chicago, they went to see another comedian performing locally. This was Lenny Bruce, and as soon as Carlin witnessed Bruce's revolutionary anti-establishment comedy, he knew that the mainstream was no longer for him. Shortly afterwards he and Burns went their separate ways, and Carlin began to develop his act in a less straightforward style. Burns would go on to enjoy a moderately successful career of his own, including becoming the head writer for The Muppet Show.
Through the sixties Carlin developed a style of character comedy, inspired by Bruce and which would later itself prove an inspiration to the young Richard Pryor, both of which men he struck up friendships with. He began to appear regularly on television, most notably on The Ed Sullivan Show and The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, which he also guest hosted. He was present during Bruce's infamous arrest for obscenity, allegedly being arrested himself for refusing to show the police his ID.
In 1970 he changed his act again, and it would lead to his own arrest and obscenity charge two years later. Growing his hair long and in a pony tail, with a matching beard, and dressing all in black, Carlin began to perform political anti-establishment material, including routines in which he openly admitted drug use. But it was his "seven words you can never say on television" routine which resulted in his brief incarceration. He was arrested in Milwaukee on July 21st 1972, but the charge was dropped later that year after a judge ruled that the words had been indecent but not obscene.
The seven words later led to a change in the US law, an fact that Carlin declared himself proud of. When a New York radio station broadcast a recording of the routine in 1973, a complaint by a listener that his son had heard the words led to a five year court battle which ended up in the Supreme Court, and resulted in the creation of a 10pm watershed for the American media, before which no material unsuitable for children was to be broadcast.
In 1975, Carlin was the guest host for the first ever episode of the legendary US late night comedy show Saturday Night Live, and in 1977 he recorded the first of his 14 HBO comedy special shows which would elevate his status in the US to that of a household name. It was around this time, unknown to the public, that he also suffered his first heart attack.
Carlin continued to perform edgy and daring comedy, his constant themes being criticism of the US government and puncturing the pomposity of the establishment, as well as mocking established religion and forming one of his own, frisbeetarianism, the belief of which was that when a person died, his soul got slung on the roof and had to stay there. In the late '80s he found a new young audience through his performances as Rufus, the time travelling mentor of the titular characters in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and it's sequel. He also, rather more bizarrely, provided the narration for the American releases of the Thomas the Tank Engine television series.
In 2003 he was at the centre of controversy again, after being fired by the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas for telling his audience that everyone who visited Las Vegas were "fucking morons" and of "limited intellect" and on being challenged by the audience told them to "blow me."
In early 2006 he suffered his second heart attack, and later that year increased his popularity again when he appeared as the voice of Fillmore, the hippie Volkswagon minibus in the Disney/Pixar movie Cars. He carried on performing right up to his death, his last performance being in Las Vegas, the city he hated so much, on June 15th. Three days later it was announced that he would be the recipient of this year's Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, a prestigious award whose previous honourees include Richard Pryor, Bob Newhart and Steve Martin. The award ceremony in November is set to go ahead, when he will become the first ever posthumous recipient.
On Sunday afternoon he was admitted to hospital complaining of chest pains. It was his third and final heart attack, and he died at 5.55pm local time.
Carlin will be remembered not just for his own long and frequently brilliant career, but for the generations of comedians worldwide who have drawn inspiration from him. In a tribute this week, Jerry Seinfeld spoke of how, no matter what idea you might come up with, someone would always tell you "Carlin did it first." I will leave the final words to his daughter, Kelly Carlin:
"Most people know George Carlin as an icon of comedy and an advocate of free speech. I just know him as Dad … and what a dad he was. He taught me the value of speaking the truth in a world that doesn't always want to hear it and gave me the gift of laughter. He was loved and revered by so many and will be missed beyond words — but never forgotten."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Since winning So You Think You're Funny seven years ago, Miles Jupp has gone about having a quietly successful career combining stand-up with acting roles, most notably probably as Archie the Inventor in the BBC children's series Balamory. 
