Lyra May - Live Review

Everybody’s got to start somewhere; but Her Dark Materials was just someone who really didn’t know what she was doing, introducing three other comics only marginally better qualified.

That’s not what this show was billed as. Lyra May described herself as a ‘Gothic clown from Hades’ and promised a ‘banquet of horror’. But aside from the over-sized plastic skull carefully positioned on stage, and May dressing in black, any idea of a Satanic journey into the depths of the soul were quietly abandoned.

She touched on the theme a bit: describing zombies in the same way as the Daily Express might describe immigrants, or proclaiming her atheism through a few scatological images – but it’s all standard open-spot fare.

Not sticking to a theme is no real sin, of course, by May’s routines were under-written, performed with little confidence – and not nearly interesting enough. The idea, say, that stage mediums might execute their frauds by asking vague questions is obvious, and acting it out with variants on: ‘Does anybody know anybody who’s died ever?’ adds nothing.

More diversions come in some fumbled audience participation, ill-thought-through and executed awkwardly, and songs, performed at the wrong tempo. There are a couple of laughs in her routine, but nothing you’d pay for.

Perhaps wary of this she added some friends to the bill. First of them was James Hately, introduced as ‘responsible for quite a few people in the Derby area getting into comedy’ – which, as a sales line, might need some work.

The same could be said of his act. He seemed jolly enough – and made much of the fact he didn’t fit the long-abandoned Gothic theme – but his brand of surreal whimsy, based around his beard and woodland creatures (what else?) lacked distinction.

Nutty Leanne McKie had a lot more spark to her. She gabbled too quickly and has dubious quality control – mixing poor puns with much more inventive asides – but blasts though with her manic ADD personality. Flashes of uniquely oddball thinking – and a couple of genuinely ace lines – suggest a world-view worth developing. It’s all a jumble at the moment, but a sweetly entertaining one, despite the serial-killer references.

Al Grant is a big, hairy, shouty man with a guitar, redolent of Mitch Benn. But his comic inspiration goes no further than saying rude things to rock riffs, with songs including Clean Bollocks and In Your Faeces. But the lyrics are boring after the first two minutes, if not before.

They say the devil has all the best tunes, but based on Her Dark Materials, he needs to do a lot more work on his comedy.

Leanne McKie - Live Review

Everybody’s got to start somewhere; but Her Dark Materials was just someone who really didn’t know what she was doing, introducing three other comics only marginally better qualified.

That’s not what this show was billed as. Lyra May described herself as a ‘Gothic clown from Hades’ and promised a ‘banquet of horror’. But aside from the over-sized plastic skull carefully positioned on stage, and May dressing in black, any idea of a Satanic journey into the depths of the soul were quietly abandoned.

She touched on the theme a bit: describing zombies in the same way as the Daily Express might describe immigrants, or proclaiming her atheism through a few scatological images – but it’s all standard open-spot fare.

Not sticking to a theme is no real sin, of course, by May’s routines were under-written, performed with little confidence – and not nearly interesting enough. The idea, say, that stage mediums might execute their frauds by asking vague questions is obvious, and acting it out with variants on: ‘Does anybody know anybody who’s died ever?’ adds nothing.

More diversions come in some fumbled audience participation, ill-thought-through and executed awkwardly, and songs, performed at the wrong tempo. There are a couple of laughs in her routine, but nothing you’d pay for.

Perhaps wary of this she added some friends to the bill. First of them was James Hately, introduced as ‘responsible for quite a few people in the Derby area getting into comedy’ – which, as a sales line, might need some work.

The same could be said of his act. He seemed jolly enough – and made much of the fact he didn’t fit the long-abandoned Gothic theme – but his brand of surreal whimsy, based around his beard and woodland creatures (what else?) lacked distinction.

Nutty Leanne McKie had a lot more spark to her. She gabbled too quickly and has dubious quality control – mixing poor puns with much more inventive asides – but blasts though with her manic ADD personality. Flashes of uniquely oddball thinking – and a couple of genuinely ace lines – suggest a world-view worth developing. It’s all a jumble at the moment, but a sweetly entertaining one, despite the serial-killer references.

Al Grant is a big, hairy, shouty man with a guitar, redolent of Mitch Benn. But his comic inspiration goes no further than saying rude things to rock riffs, with songs including Clean Bollocks and In Your Faeces. But the lyrics are boring after the first two minutes, if not before.

They say the devil has all the best tunes, but based on Her Dark Materials, he needs to do a lot more work on his comedy.

Al Grant - Live Review

Everybody’s got to start somewhere; but Her Dark Materials was just someone who really didn’t know what she was doing, introducing three other comics only marginally better qualified.

That’s not what this show was billed as. Lyra May described herself as a ‘Gothic clown from Hades’ and promised a ‘banquet of horror’. But aside from the over-sized plastic skull carefully positioned on stage, and May dressing in black, any idea of a Satanic journey into the depths of the soul were quietly abandoned.

She touched on the theme a bit: describing zombies in the same way as the Daily Express might describe immigrants, or proclaiming her atheism through a few scatological images – but it’s all standard open-spot fare.

Not sticking to a theme is no real sin, of course, by May’s routines were under-written, performed with little confidence – and not nearly interesting enough. The idea, say, that stage mediums might execute their frauds by asking vague questions is obvious, and acting it out with variants on: ‘Does anybody know anybody who’s died ever?’ adds nothing.

More diversions come in some fumbled audience participation, ill-thought-through and executed awkwardly, and songs, performed at the wrong tempo. There are a couple of laughs in her routine, but nothing you’d pay for.

Perhaps wary of this she added some friends to the bill. First of them was James Hately, introduced as ‘responsible for quite a few people in the Derby area getting into comedy’ – which, as a sales line, might need some work.

The same could be said of his act. He seemed jolly enough – and made much of the fact he didn’t fit the long-abandoned Gothic theme – but his brand of surreal whimsy, based around his beard and woodland creatures (what else?) lacked distinction.

Nutty Leanne McKie had a lot more spark to her. She gabbled too quickly and has dubious quality control – mixing poor puns with much more inventive asides – but blasts though with her manic ADD personality. Flashes of uniquely oddball thinking – and a couple of genuinely ace lines – suggest a world-view worth developing. It’s all a jumble at the moment, but a sweetly entertaining one, despite the serial-killer references.

Al Grant is a big, hairy, shouty man with a guitar, redolent of Mitch Benn. But his comic inspiration goes no further than saying rude things to rock riffs, with songs including Clean Bollocks and In Your Faeces. But the lyrics are boring after the first two minutes, if not before.

They say the devil has all the best tunes, but based on Her Dark Materials, he needs to do a lot more work on his comedy.

James Hately - Live Review

Everybody’s got to start somewhere; but Her Dark Materials was just someone who really didn’t know what she was doing, introducing three other comics only marginally better qualified.

That’s not what this show was billed as. Lyra May described herself as a ‘Gothic clown from Hades’ and promised a ‘banquet of horror’. But aside from the over-sized plastic skull carefully positioned on stage, and May dressing in black, any idea of a Satanic journey into the depths of the soul were quietly abandoned.

She touched on the theme a bit: describing zombies in the same way as the Daily Express might describe immigrants, or proclaiming her atheism through a few scatological images – but it’s all standard open-spot fare.

Not sticking to a theme is no real sin, of course, by May’s routines were under-written, performed with little confidence – and not nearly interesting enough. The idea, say, that stage mediums might execute their frauds by asking vague questions is obvious, and acting it out with variants on: ‘Does anybody know anybody who’s died ever?’ adds nothing.

More diversions come in some fumbled audience participation, ill-thought-through and executed awkwardly, and songs, performed at the wrong tempo. There are a couple of laughs in her routine, but nothing you’d pay for.

Perhaps wary of this she added some friends to the bill. First of them was James Hately, introduced as ‘responsible for quite a few people in the Derby area getting into comedy’ – which, as a sales line, might need some work.

The same could be said of his act. He seemed jolly enough – and made much of the fact he didn’t fit the long-abandoned Gothic theme – but his brand of surreal whimsy, based around his beard and woodland creatures (what else?) lacked distinction.

Nutty Leanne McKie had a lot more spark to her. She gabbled too quickly and has dubious quality control – mixing poor puns with much more inventive asides – but blasts though with her manic ADD personality. Flashes of uniquely oddball thinking – and a couple of genuinely ace lines – suggest a world-view worth developing. It’s all a jumble at the moment, but a sweetly entertaining one, despite the serial-killer references.

Al Grant is a big, hairy, shouty man with a guitar, redolent of Mitch Benn. But his comic inspiration goes no further than saying rude things to rock riffs, with songs including Clean Bollocks and In Your Faeces. But the lyrics are boring after the first two minutes, if not before.

They say the devil has all the best tunes, but based on Her Dark Materials, he needs to do a lot more work on his comedy.

Nick Hodder - Live Review

As stand-up expands so rapidly, so has the number of comedians who choose the practices of their chosen profession as a legitimate target for mockery. After all, comedy itself is the prime obsession for most of its practitioners, who would be well aware of the age-old mantra ‘write what you know’.

So here we have Nick Hodder deriding cliched jokes, stand-ups who want to be E4 presenters and observational comics just ‘describing the obvious’. Yet he – as well as the comedy geeks his show is aimed at – must be well aware that jokes about stand-ups who want to be E4 presenters and observational comics just describing the obvious are pretty clichéd themselves these days. And that’s the inherent problem his debut show, Insert Comedy Here, struggles to overcome.

The premise – which is full of potential – is that Hodder can’t be arsed to craft his routine, so he’s gone on the internet and brought a ‘teach-yourself’ CD designed to make him instantly into a successful cookie-cutter comedian. There’s some half-joke that this is both a learning resource for the newbie, yet designed to be played just before taking to the O2 stage, which only adds a discrepancy to the set-up, which you have to overlook.

The dismembered voice explains how to glad-hand the audience, break the ice with a joke about who you look like, riff on the differences between men and women, drop in a pat bit of nostalgia or animal-based whimsy and so forth.

Aware that simply taking pot-shots at fellow comedians could easily come across as ungracious or arrogant, Hodder has smartly assumed the low-status persona of a nervous, awkward loser, unable to follow the broad instructions. He pulls this off well, making for a sympathetic character, and there are a few, if not enough, decent jokes amid all the deconstruction.

But his take on the lazy tropes of comedy isn’t nearly insightful or original enough, with the points he makes almost taken as given. Certainly most comedy reviewers would be expected go deeper their analysis, yet a comedian with supposed insider knowledge can’t.

The show is wrapped up with a rather trite cheesy conclusion that by-the-book is no way to do comedy, and it has to come from within – as if we couldn’t have figured that out for ourselves. Only problem is, this offering (still an work-in-progress for Edinburgh, although not billed as such) doesn’t seem to have come from within, and rather seems like a repeat of all-too common opinions, even if expressed with a few flourishes of decent writing.

Nick Hodder - Live Review

As stand-up expands so rapidly, so has the number of comedians who choose the practices of their chosen profession as a legitimate target for mockery. After all, comedy itself is the prime obsession for most of its practitioners, who would be well aware of the age-old mantra ‘write what you know’.

So here we have Nick Hodder deriding cliched jokes, stand-ups who want to be E4 presenters and observational comics just ‘describing the obvious’. Yet he – as well as the comedy geeks his show is aimed at – must be well aware that jokes about stand-ups who want to be E4 presenters and observational comics just describing the obvious are pretty clichéd themselves these days. And that’s the inherent problem his debut show, Insert Comedy Here, struggles to overcome.

The premise – which is full of potential – is that Hodder can’t be arsed to craft his routine, so he’s gone on the internet and brought a ‘teach-yourself’ CD designed to make him instantly into a successful cookie-cutter comedian. There’s some half-joke that this is both a learning resource for the newbie, yet designed to be played just before taking to the O2 stage, which only adds a discrepancy to the set-up, which you have to overlook.

The dismembered voice explains how to glad-hand the audience, break the ice with a joke about who you look like, riff on the differences between men and women, drop in a pat bit of nostalgia or animal-based whimsy and so forth.

Aware that simply taking pot-shots at fellow comedians could easily come across as ungracious or arrogant, Hodder has smartly assumed the low-status persona of a nervous, awkward loser, unable to follow the broad instructions. He pulls this off well, making for a sympathetic character, and there are a few, if not enough, decent jokes amid all the deconstruction.

But his take on the lazy tropes of comedy isn’t nearly insightful or original enough, with the points he makes almost taken as given. Certainly most comedy reviewers would be expected go deeper their analysis, yet a comedian with supposed insider knowledge can’t.

The show is wrapped up with a rather trite cheesy conclusion that by-the-book is no way to do comedy, and it has to come from within – as if we couldn’t have figured that out for ourselves. Only problem is, this offering (still an work-in-progress for Edinburgh, although not billed as such) doesn’t seem to have come from within, and rather seems like a repeat of all-too common opinions, even if expressed with a few flourishes of decent writing.