Category Archives: Comedy

‘I went to school drunk in a bikini’: how Sophie Willan turned her chaotic life into sitcom gold

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She won a Bafta for Alma’s Not Normal – and that was just the pilot episode. As the full series launches, the ex-standup talks about growing up in care, getting the comedy bug in Ibiza and finally hitting the big time

Earlier this year, Sophie Willan went through an extraordinary run of extreme highs and lows. She was filming her sitcom Alma’s Not Normal, a project she started working on years ago, when her grandmother died. She had brought Willan up for part of her childhood and inspired a character in the show. The day after, Willan found out she had been Bafta nominated for comedy writing.

A few weeks later, while she watched the ceremony on a laptop on a picnic bench outside the converted barn she was staying in, Willan was named the winner. Her response, posted on Instagram by castmate Jayde Adams, is the most joyous thing you may see all year: Willan takes off on a victory lap, magnificent red sequinned dress matching a tractor in the background, sprinting and shouting “What the fuck?” over and over. “I woke up all the kids that had been put to bed in the house next door,” says Willan, laughing. “It was fabulous. It was surreal.”

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Ed Asner, who played Lou Grant in two hit shows, dies aged 91

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  • Actor shone in The Mary Tyler Moore Show and spin-off
  • Spell as Screen Actors Guild president ended over liberal views

Ed Asner, a burly and prolific character actor who became a star in middle age as the gruff but lovable newsman Lou Grant, first in the hit comedy The Mary Tyler Moore Show and later in the drama Lou Grant, died on Sunday. He was 91.

Related: Ed Asner obituary

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‘Marty just kept following me!’ Steve Martin and Martin Short on their 35-year friendship

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The comic legends clicked on the set of 1986’s Three Amigos and have been a double act since. They talk fame, fatherhood and finding inspiration for their new series in Murder, She Wrote

It is when I hear myself quoting Steve Martin and Martin Short’s jokes back at the men themselves, from films they made decades ago, that I know for certain that I am not going to get through this interview with my dignity intact.

“And then you said this, Steve, and then, Marty, you made that face – and I loved that!” I burble.

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Pose star Sandra Bernhard: ‘I never tried to be revolutionary. That’s just who I was’

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The trailblazing actor and comedian on asserting her bisexuality in the 80s, misogynistic male comics – and befriending Madonna

During nearly five decades in showbiz, Sandra Bernhard has racked up title after title – comedian, actor, singer, author, radio host – and a reputation for controversy. She has worked with a long list of superstars, from Richard Pryor and Robin Williams to Robert De Niro and Cyndi Lauper. But she has never been overshadowed; her force of personality has guaranteed that. Even 30 years ago, the Los Angeles Times was paying homage to her “acid-tongued, antagonistic persona”.

But there are no cutting remarks today. On this sunny morning in LA, she appears relaxed, in a pink-striped shirt and trousers, reminiscent of the early 80s outfits she wore for her many appearances on Late Night With David Letterman.

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Edinburgh Fringe returns with mix of in-person and online shows

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Festival is part of world’s largest annual arts season which has been forced to curtail events due to Covid

The Edinburgh festival Fringe returns this weekend with a hybrid programme of nearly 800 in-person and online shows after its cancellation last year because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Fringe makes up part of the world’s largest annual arts season, alongside the Edinburgh international festival and the book and film festivals, which open later this month, and all have been forced to significantly curtail this August’s events for the second year running. One of the most famous, the military tattoo staged at Edinburgh castle, has again been cancelled.

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Zola review – pulp-factual viral tweet becomes an icily slick urban thriller

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Aziah ‘Zola’ Wells’s viral story of her crazily dangerous 2015 trip to Florida in search of pole-dancing money is brought to the screen with seductive comedy

In 2015, a part-time dancer from Detroit called Aziah “Zola” Wells went viral with a cheeky Twitter thread purporting to tell the pulp-factual tale of her recent, crazily dangerous road trip to Florida with someone called Jessica, whom she’d only just met. This woman had persuaded Zola there was big money in pole-dancing for rich clients in Tampa, but Zola had to share the car with Jessica’s creepy boyfriend and even creepier pimp, and soon it was clear that Zola was going to have to do much more than dance. She was in way over her head.

Or was she? Followers of Zola’s posts loved them at least partly for how outrageously unreliable they were: Zola was clearly embellishing, or pre-emptively giving her side of the story before Jessica did the same. Now this has been turned into a very entertaining lowlife crime comedy from director and co-writer Janicza Bravo, a film that preserves the fishy flavour of the online original – if perhaps only semi-intentionally – and has interesting things to say about the exhaustingly performative and self-promotional world of social media.

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Comic Jamie MacDonald on being creative and blind: ‘It’s triumph with – not over – adversity’

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In new BBC show Blind Ambition, MacDonald and Jamie O’Leary meet artists who have lost their sight – including a rapper, a photographer and a wood turner ‘who still has all his fingers’

I’m a blind standup comedian, currently co-starring in the BBC Two documentary Blind Ambition. As the title suggests, the show is about blindness. But please don’t think this is a violins, tissues at the ready, “oh didn’t they do well” type of documentary. The show creator and Essex wide boy Jamie O’Leary wanted to make a different kind of show about disability.

You’ll know the classic disabled show formula: person has a dark phase then overcomes their disability and achieves something wonderful. In this paradigm the disability is a hurdle that needs to be jumped over. Or, if there are mobility issues at play, an obstacle to get around. In the Blind Ambition paradigm, blindness – a disability readers of the New York Times voted the worst thing a person could have in the world (which is bollocks as blind people can’t read the flipping New York Times so couldn’t vote) – is positive.

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The Suicide Squad review – eyeball-blitzing supervillain reboot

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Guardians of the Galaxy’s James Gunn is a good directorial fit for the humour and freaky violence of DC’s bad-guy jamboree

DC’s new Suicide Squad movie announces itself as different from the coolly received first film from 2016 simply by adding “The” to the title, maybe sneakily trying for an unacknowledged rebrand or reboot. James Gunn, also in charge of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, is brought on board as director and co-writer. This second Squad outing (if you don’t count last year’s standalone Harley Quinn adventure Birds of Prey) is a long, loud, often enjoyable and amusing film that blitzes your eyeballs and eardrums and covers all the bases. There is Guardians-style comedy mixing humans and talking animals, there is freaky violence – including what I have to say is a gruesomely impressive interior-anatomical shot, showing a knife plunging into the still-beating heart – and there is colossal CGI spectacle for the final act in which a giant thing runs rampant in a city, while the gang look up at it; a trope that has become almost legally mandatory for superhero movies.

Viola Davis once again brings a touch of class to the Suicide Squad franchise as the chillingly manipulative security chief Amanda Waller who now springs supervillain Bloodsport (Idris Elba) from jail so that he can head up an elite new crew of misfits, desperadoes and undesirables. These include Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman), the ironically belligerent Peacemaker (John Cena), King Shark – a great big talking shark in Hulk-ish stretchy shorts – voiced by Sylvester Stallone, Ratcatcher II (Daniela Melchior), who commands an army of rats wherever she goes, and Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian), who fires molten polka-dots at the enemy, revving himself up for the task by imagining that this is his overbearing mother. There is also a kind of B-team of Squadders whose job is to be hilariously expendable.

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Jackie Mason: compellingly blunt joke-teller who was part of standup history

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Though in later years he fell from fashion, his rabbinical style in early routines felt very much like live comedy’s native tongue

If Jackie Mason could speak to us now, he’d surely be reporting back on the amusing ways in which Jews do the afterlife. But if we’ll never get to hear that particular hot take (“If it’s in the news,” he used to say, “it’s in the show”), in his long career in comedy Mason made sure to cover his people’s every other trait and proclivity. If anyone ever doubted that Jewish America had created standup comedy as we now know it, Mason – born Yacov Moshe Maza – stood as living proof.

That’s part of what made his shows compelling long after his opinions curdled and his comedy fell from fashion. The theatres he played in were like Tardises spinning us back to the so-called Borscht Belt of the Catskill mountains in the 1950s, where Jewish America spent its summers laughing at Sid Caesar, Milton Berle, Jack Benny – and Mason himself, who worked as a busboy and a lifeguard there before turning his hand to jokes. He was good at them, so he quit working as a rabbi – a career path followed by his three brothers and all their male forebears – and the rest was comedy history.

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US standup comedian Jackie Mason dies in New York aged 93

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Mason, who was a rabbi before turning to comedy, was known for his sharp wit and piercing social commentary

Jackie Mason, a rabbi-turned-comedian whose feisty brand of standup comedy led him to Catskills nightclubs, west coast talk shows and Broadway stages, has died. He was 93.

Mason died on Saturday at 6pm local time in Mount Sinai hospital in Manhattan after being in hospital for more than two weeks, the celebrity lawyer Raoul Felder said.

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Lockdown reawakened my childhood love of chess. Now I can’t do anything else | Phil Wang

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The alert I get when an opponent has made their move gives me the shot of excitement I used to get from social media notifications

Lord help me, I am in the whirlwind throes of the beautiful game. Online chess. The ancient pastime enjoyed a boom late last year. And I got caught squarely in its blast. Chess.com, the internet’s leading chess platform, saw an eruption in activity, triggered by lockdown idleness and (my own personal inciting event) Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit, which landed in October 2020, and showed the world that chess is actually really cool. As long as you ignore the actual chess and focus instead on the narcotic-fuelled psychodrama of a very beautiful woman and put the kid from Love Actually in a cowboy hat, for some reason.

But there was enough actual chess in the show to reawaken my old love for the game. I’d played a lot as a child, as you can probably tell from my face. I played in the school club and entered competitions. I collected sets, including a Simpsons one and a Lord Of The Rings one, allowing me to play the pieces from one board against those of the other. No, I didn’t go out much as a kid. But how could I when I was busy battling the dark forces of Sauron with an army of Barts?

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Jason Sudeikis: ‘Ted Lasso isn’t a show, it’s a vibe’

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The SNL star turned Hollywood mainstay plays a caring, sharing football coach in the award-winning comedy from Apple TV+ but is he as nice in real life?

How much of Jason Sudeikis is Ted Lasso, and how much of Ted Lasso is Jason Sudeikis? The extraordinarily strong hairline belongs to both, but that’s where the similarities start to swim apart and fuse together: Lasso wears a cheerfully thick moustache with his, while Sudeikis tends towards clean-shaven; since his 2003 start on SNL, Sudeikis has spent the last 18 years making people laugh, while Lasso’s attempts at humour (“Your body is like day-old rice – if it ain’t warmed up properly, something real bad could happen”) often whoosh over the heads of those around him. But they both seemingly spend an unusual amount of thought and care on the lesser-appreciated component parts that make a large organisation (a movie set; a football club) tick.

Related: The Guide: Staying In – sign up for our home entertainment tips

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Riders of Justice review – Mads Mikkelsen revenge thriller turns screwball

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Anders Thomas Jensen’s film is far-fetched, tonally wayward and shouldn’t work at all, but somehow it all comes together

The poster image of a grey-bearded, shaven-headed, tooled-up, mean-looking Mads Mikkelsen, combined with that title, might set alarm bells ringing … along the lines of, “Oh no, he’s doing a Taken.” Blessedly, rather than giving us a straightahead middle-aged revenge thriller, this unpredictable Danish film takes apart the whole trope. There are action thrills, to be sure, but they are folded into what becomes a sort of group therapy session on the psychology of grief, guilt, vengeance, chance and coincidence. Even more blessedly, it’s often hilarious.

Mikkelsen plays Markus, a military commander who is recalled from Afghanistan when his wife is killed in a train crash. He might have a particular set of skills, as Liam Neeson would put it, but emotional intelligence is not one of them. Markus refuses counselling and struggles to connect with his teenage daughter. Fortunately, along comes Otto (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), a maths geek who happened to be on the same train as Markus’s wife. He is accompanied by eccentric sidekicks Lennart (Lars Brygmann), and Emmenthaler (Nicolas Bro). They are convinced the crash was not an accident but a targeted killing connected to a violent biker gang.

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Mo Gilligan: ‘I did bake biscuits in lockdown, but it’s too much faff’

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The comedian and Masked Singer panellist on his fascination with chicken, mum’s Caribbean specials and the secret to great mac and cheese

At home, my mum did the cooking. It was me, my two sisters and my mum. She mainly cooked Caribbean dishes: mutton and rice, curry chicken and rice, sometimes curry goat, rice and peas, but that would be for a wedding or something. You wouldn’t have curry goat all the time. It’s mad when I think about it, because when you’ve got kids and you’ve just come back from work, I can see how easy it is to put some chips in the oven. But my mum was always cooking from scratch. To this day, she still does it.

We couldn’t afford the supermarket. My mum would get a lot from the markets, predominantly East Street or Brixton Market. We’d eat a lot of fish: snapper, sometimes red bream. It’s only since I’ve gotten a bit older that I’ve had other fish, like sea bass for example. Yeah, we weren’t eating sea bass.

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I Think You Should Leave: the sketch show exposing our online egomania

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Digging deep into the nonsensical and narcissistic – yet apparently acceptable –ways that we behave online, Tim Robinson’s Netflix series is ahead of the curve

In the first season of I Think You Should Leave, Tim Robinson’s superlative Netflix show, there’s a sketch that made me laugh more than any joke I have ever seen on social media. In it, a trio of brunching women decide to post an attractive picture of themselves on Instagram, accompanied by an obligatory and utterly transparent self-deprecating caption, “so it doesn’t look like you’re just bragging”. But one of the party can’t get to grips with this odd internet etiquette. “OK, got it,” she grins earnestly. “Slopping down some pig-shit with these fat fucks, and I’m the fattest of them all. If I died tomorrow no one would shed a tear. Load my frickin’ lard carcass into the mud, no coffin please, just wet, wet mud. Bae.”

You might think the vortex of narcissism, desperation and mindless rote behaviour that characterises many people’s Instagram use would be an obvious, not to say rather tired, subject for satire by now. In fact, TV comedy that mines laughs from the warped ways people behave online is vanishingly rare. But I Think You Should Leave – which returned for a much-lauded second season this week – does it in practically every sketch, drilling down into the absurdity of online interaction, and, in doing so, exposes the half-obscured egomania and self-interest that drives it.

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Feel Good’s Mae Martin: ‘If you put a teenage girl in any industry, people will take advantage’

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The non-binary comedian’s hit TV show draws heavily on an often troubled life. They talk about addiction at 14, the loving parents who kicked them out, the older men who abused their trust – and the happiness they eventually found

At the beginning of the pandemic Mae Martin’s first TV series, Feel Good, was broadcast on Channel 4 to great acclaim. Just recently, the second series came out on Netflix to even greater acclaim. While most of us have disappeared in lockdown, Martin has become a star.

Feel Good is a disarmingly autobiographical love story. It tells the story of a character called Mae struggling with relationships, addiction, identity and life on the comedy circuit. Mae is attracted to men and women, but to women more, particularly women who identify as straight. The first series focuses on Mae’s relationship with Georgina, a teacher who had previously only slept with men and is reluctant to admit to her super-straight, super-posh friends that she and Mae are living together. Mae is a mix of streetwise and naive – reckless, precocious, promiscuous, self-absorbed and a bag of nerves.

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Hear me out: why Confessions of a Shopaholic isn’t a bad movie

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The latest in our series of writers defending maligned films is a reconsideration of a critically loathed 2009 comedy

When Confessions of a Shopaholic, directed by PJ Hogan, of Muriel’s Wedding acclaim, was released in 2009 – a year that brought us the high-octane, male-dominated likes of The Hangover, Sherlock Holmes and Inglourious Basterds – it was the tail end of the romcom’s golden age. And, just like its genre-mates released that year – Bride Wars, He’s Just Not That Into You, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past – Shopaholic received a wave of scathing reviews, weighing in at just 26% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Related: Hear me out: why Ishtar isn’t a bad movie

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John Oliver rips into US clean-energy loans: ‘This business model is fundamentally flawed’

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The Last Week Tonight host digs into a government program whose lack of oversight has left many risking their homes

John Oliver turned his attention this week to a public lending program called Pace, whose state-supported clean energy loans have stranded many vulnerable homeowners in overwhelming debt or at risk of losing their homes. The program, which stands for Property Assessed Clean Energy, “is a cautionary tale about how good intentions when not paired with careful, smart design, can end in disaster”, the Last Week Tonight host explained.

Through Pace, local governments borrow money at low rates made available to low-income borrowers for energy-saving home improvements, which are then paid back through increases to property taxes.

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Bob Odenkirk: ‘Soon people won’t remember Breaking Bad’

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He charmed as slimeball lawyer Saul in the drugs drama and its spinoff – but now Bob Odenkirk has gone badass in action thriller Nobody. Has he left his comedy days behind?

On the surface, Bob Odenkirk’s new film is entirely preposterous. As the story of a man who goes on a murder spree after his house is broken into, Nobody is an all-out, full-throated action movie. In one scene, 58-year-old Odenkirk tears a handrail off the inside of a bus and beats a man senseless with it.

However, as he explains, the story stems from something much more personal. “My family had two break-ins,” he reveals from his home in LA, where he’s sitting beneath a vast Chinatown poster. “It was very damaging.”

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‘My parents still have no clue what I’m doing’: Lupin star Omar Sy on Hollywood, fame and fighting racism

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After a decade in Hollywood, French actor Omar Sy returned home to star in Netflix’s much-loved hit, Lupin. He talks about playing the charming thief, growing up with Arsenal’s Nicolas Anelka and his battle with racism

Actors, obliged to exhaustively market their wares, will pose for hours in front of posters of their latest film or TV show. They’ll hop between city premieres, sit on dreary festival panels, tell rehearsed comic stories on night-time talkshows, then get up early to be on breakfast radio. Before meeting Omar Sy, a 43-year-old Frenchman who stars in the massively popular Netflix drama Lupin, I’d never heard of an actor picking up a bucket and brush to spend a day gluing up their own billboard posters on the Paris metro. Sy, who is 6ft 2in, born in a working-class Parisian suburb to West African parents, explains the thinking behind this unusual marketing stunt that took place just before the first series of Lupin debuted earlier this year.

“A lot of people know me in Paris,” begins Sy, who worked as a comedian in France through his 20s before becoming a film star there in his early 30s. “Because people in France have watched me in stuff for years, I’m used to meeting strangers who recognise me and who already have smiles on their faces.” In Lupin, lightly adapted from the classic heist books by Maurice Leblanc, Sy plays a French-Senegalese man called Assane Diop, an anonymous Parisian who is used to being ignored and overlooked in his home town, but who is willing to use that to his advantage while robbing the city’s jet-set blind. “The show is entertainment and we want to have fun with it,” he says, “but at the same time we’re talking about something very serious: that some people in France are simply not seen.”

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