Comedy

COOGAN, 41, raked in the cash from his hit sitcom I'm Alan Partridge and he is also said to have been paid #3million for playing Phileas Fogg in the big-budget remake of Around The World In Eighty Days. … [Read more...] about FUNNY MONEY – THE COMEDY RICH LIST

“In the film Olympus Has Fallen, Butler gained personal redemption by saving the president’s toned ass when terrorists stormed the White House,” wrote the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw. “Now they’re in London for a state occasion and it all kicks off again, with dozens of tourist landmarks shattered by evil-doers from a country Butler robustly calls ‘Fuckheadistan’ – and they’re using surprisingly cheap-looking digital effects.” … [Read more...] about Disney’s Zootopia beats Frozen’s record with roaring $73.7m opening in US

“I am,” she begins, “a triple threat: I’m disabled, I’m gay – and I’m a prick.” Many is the joke (like the one about auditioning for street dance troupe Diversity) that seems to be about Jones’s disability – before revealing itself to be about that key third characteristic. Jones’ slow speech is her ally here: she lets us formulate her punchlines in our heads, then pulls the rug with a different – usually darker – laugh line entirely. … [Read more...] about Rosie Jones review – mischief, filth and poleaxing punchlines

Other comics must envy Stewart Lee, and not just because he is officially the 41st best stand-up comedian ever (according to a recent poll). While others need to write enough new jokes to fill an hour, Lee writes just half a dozen, then repeats them over and over again until an hour is passed. That we don't (very often) feel cheated and do laugh, a lot, is testament to Lee's comedy virtuosity. This isn't so much stand-up as a game of chicken, in which Lee looks the audience in the whites of their eyes, and works a single joke - and works it, and works it - and will never be the one to blink first. … [Read more...] about Stewart Lee

The show is entirely its own thing: a run-through of 24 hitherto unknown Spice Girls, while delivering big, out-of-nowhere gags that could easily appeal to a wide audience. It is framed as a defence of nonsense. Our host – sporting shorts, a headband and a moustache died blue, in case we didn’t know where he was coming from – thinks stories are “a fantastic way of being lied to” and that absurdism better reflects the chaos of being alive. The Spice Girls, with their neat categories (Scary, Posh and so on), were just another failed system to make the world explicable. Better to let the madness in, as Roberts does by introducing us to Facts About the Romans Spice, Twenty-Seven Babies Spice and Lady Bracknell Crossed With a Theramin Spice – a funny premise, funnily realised. … [Read more...] about John-Luke Roberts review – Spice up your life with the nonsense manifesto