Comedy
David Quantick’s The Mule: lost in the world of translation
For those who read the weekly music press during the 1980s, David Quantick’s was a name you could rely on.…
When Groucho Marx lectured T.S. Eliot
Groucho Marx was delighted when he heard that the script for one of his old Vaudeville routines was being reprinted…
The Mother is meaningless - I predict great things for it
Florian Zeller has been reading Pinter. And Pinter started out in repertory thrillers where suspense was created by delaying revelations…
An Egyptian comedy of errors
The Yacoubian Building, the first novel of the Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany, sold well over a million copies in…
Dreams don’t have to make sense - but TV dramas do: Peter & Wendy reviewed
On the face of it, ITV’s Peter & Wendy sounded like a perfect family offering for Boxing Day: an adaptation…
Tricycle’s Ben Hur is magnificent in its superficiality - a masterpiece of nothing
It’s the target that makes the satire as well as the satirist. Is the subject powerful, active, relevant and menacing?…
Victorian music-hall comedy wasn’t funny. Why pretend it was?
Let’s start this week with a joke: ‘You know Mrs Kelly? Do you know Mrs Kelly? Her husband’s that little…
Shakespeare at his freest and most exuberant: The Wars of the Roses reviewed
The RSC’s The Wars of the Roses solves a peculiar literary problem. Shakespeare’s earliest history plays are entitled Henry VI…
Woody Allen: a life of jazz, laughter, depression —and a few misdemeanours
Woody Allen (born Allan Stewart Konigsberg), the prolific, Oscar-winning auteur, New Orleans-style jazz clarinettist, doyen of New York delicatessen society,…
A gleeful vision of the future from Margaret Atwood
What could happen in literature to a young couple — or a pair of young couples — who fall off…
Where comics find their Edinburgh comfort food
Mum’s, or to use its full title, Mum’s Great Comfort Food, is a restaurant in Edinburgh designed to soothe itinerant…
Edinburgh Fringe highlights: world-class improv, Bible study and an hour with a gentle genius
Showstopper! The Improvised Musical offers a brand new song-and-dance spectacular at every performance. It opens with a brilliantly chaotic piece…
Feels like Chekhov scripted by a Chekhov app: Three Days in the Country at the Lyttleton reviewed
Chekhov so dominates 19th-century Russian drama that Turgenev doesn’t get much of a look-in. His best known play, A Month…
She's Funny That Way isn't funny at all
The writer and director Peter Bogdanovich has made three of my favourite films of all time (The Last Picture Show,…
Imagine if Are You Being Served? had starred Laurence Olivier: ITV’s Vicious reviewed
Monday saw the return of possibly the weirdest TV series in living memory. Imagine a parallel universe in which Are…
Jackie Mason reveals the secret of stand-up: avoid fried food
What does it take to be a stand-up comic? Jackie Mason has absolutely no idea
Top Five reviewed: Chris Rock hits rock bottom
The oeuvre of Chris Rock may not be fully known in this parish. He was the African-American stand-up who made…
Taxi ride to the dark side: a thrilling blast of full-strength Irvine Welsh
Irvine Welsh, I think it’s safe to say, is not a writer who’s mellowing with age. His latest book sees…
Miranda July may be a film director, performance artist, sculptor and designer — but she is no novelist
Miranda July is a funny and brilliant film director, performance artist, sculptor and smartphone app designer. In 2005, she won…
The Voices review: a hateful, repellent, empty film
The Voices is ‘a dark comedy about a serial killer’, which is not an overcrowded genre, and I think we…
The Heckler: how funny really was Spitting Image?
Hold the front page! Spitting Image is back! Well, sort of. A new six-part series, from (some of) the team…
A tatty new theatre offers up a comic gem that’s sure to be snapped up by the BBC
New venue. New enticement. In the undercroft of a vast but disregarded Bloomsbury church nestles the Museum of Comedy. The…
Radio 4’s War and Peace: almost as good as the book
To have listened to Radio 4’s marathon ten-hour adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace as it was being broadcast on…
What unites Churchill, Dali and T.S. Eliot? They all worshipped the Marx Brothers
Ian Thomson celebrates the anarchic genius of Groucho and his brothers
Fortune tellers, pound shops and Orville: why I love Blackpool
Fortune tellers, pound shops and Orville: it’s easy to take the piss out of Blackpool, but William Cook loves it
