Tag: comedy

Paul Merton’s Silent Clowns

We went to the last of our comedy events for the festival yesterday – Paul Merton’s Silent Clowns. To be honest, I’d expected more talking about the films, but what we got was three silent films shown in their entirity.

Charlie Chaplin in The Cure, Laurel and Hardy in Big Business and Buster Keaton in Sherlock Jr. All of these were accompanied by Neil Brand whose timing was excellent. A great afternoon of entertainment, and a foray into a genre of films I know very little about not to mention a reminder of just how amused I am by Laurel and Hardy.

Ross Noble and Jo Caulfield

We managed another couple of comedy events as part of the Brighton Comedy Festival. Last Sunday we saw the excellent Ross Noble at the Dome. Very funny, and judging from some of the reviews, he improvises a lot, changing a lot of his material from show to show.

Last night we saw Jo Caulfield at the Pavillion Theatre. Her show is all about things that make you angry and annoyed, allowing for amusing rants about argos, familes and leaving time to take audience suggestions – a lot of people in Brighton seem to be annoyed by cyclists!! She’d done her research about Brighton, being able to name various landmarks and appreciate the difference between Brighton and Hove (actually!) which is always a good sign. I thought her idea for a range of greetings cards were great – “Congratulations on your marriage, remember the gift I bought you for your first wedding? Good” :-).

Both of these have been “laugh out loud funny” for me. This afternoon we’re off to see Paul Merton’s Silent Clowns which includes a full showing of Laurel and Hardy’s Big Business.

We went to see

We went to see Marcus Brigstocke‘s show at the corn Exchange on Monday. A surprisingly flat evening: the performance was fine, there was some good material, but…. meh.

Also annoying was one of his ideas for Atheist Airways, which ended with pun of the pilot not saying what the cruising altitude was because he wouldn’t commit to anything. Which is fine, except it’s confusing atheists with agnostics, and even then an agnostic might actually say that the cruising altitude was something that couldn’t be known. You know what… it’s best not to analyze jokes.

For anyone who’s familiar with his rants on The Now Show, you’ll know about his problems with BT. So it was fun to see two large BT trucks parked right outside the theater at the end of the show, with some burly engineers standing around, maybe waiting for someone…