Chris Rock On tour
"Don't let all this celebrity news fool you. All that stuff is just a trick to get your mind off the war." Chris Rock is the most exciting stand-up comedian currently working in the USA, and this week, for the first time, you can see him working over here. Born in South Carolina, raised in Brooklyn, and a regular club comic by his late teens, he was spotted by Eddie Murphy, who eventually gave this stand-up prodigy a role in Beverly Hills Cop II. Like Murphy, he has huge crossover appeal and an upbeat stage style, but the depth of his material is more like Richard Pryor's. He doesn't just articulate the African American experience, or even the American experience - he expresses the thoughts and feelings of anyone who's at all curious about the world around them. His observations are universal, even though they come from a particular time and place.
William Cook
· Apollo, Manchester, Mon 7 & Tue 8; Hammersmith Apollo, W6, Wed 9 to Jan 25
Craig Hill Leicester
Anyone who watches BBC Scotland will be very familiar with Scots comic Craig Hill, but he's still relatively unknown down south. This Friday Sassenach punters can see what they've been missing. With his shaven head and black leather kilt, he's Scotland's answer to Graham Norton - just as camp, but a lot tougher and much more streetwise. His party piece is doing musical impressions and incongruous cover versions (Shirley Bassey sings the Smiths, Julie Andrews sings the Sex Pistols), but he's a super presenter and interviewer, too. He's not quite up there with Jonathan Ross just yet, but he could give Johnny Vaughan a run for his money. If you fancy a taster, here are a few of the alternative 10 commandments he came up with for Gay Times: don't kill an outfit with an unnecessary brooch; don't steal, just borrow, wear, ruin and replace; and don't worship false Pop Idols.
William Cook
· Jongleurs Leicester, Fri 11
Paul Sinha Belfast
There's really not a lot of point in ripping the piss out of Paul Sinha. This stimulating up-and-coming Anglo-Asian stand-up, a regular on the UK club circuit, has already cracked most of the best jokes himself. As Sinha says, he's chubby and brown, but he's not Chubby Brown - and his humour reflects both his liberal perspective and his eclectic roots. He's from a Bengali family, he went to public school (Dulwich College, like PG Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler), and he became a general practitioner before branching out into stand-up. He's also homosexual. "I'm a gay man trapped inside a straight man's body - but not in a good way," he says. It can't have been all that easy to come out, not when - as he says - the status of a gay man in Hindu culture is "just below a leper, just above someone who doesn't understand cricket." He kicks off his new solo tour in Northern Ireland this week, with dates as far afield as Madrid and Barcelona to follow.
William Cook
· Black Box, Wed 9
