Doug Stanhope, on tour
“I’m Doug Stanhope, and that’s why I drink.” Regular watchers of Weekly Wipe will already be familiar with Charlie Brooker’s booze-soaked US correspondent, but for those new to Stanhope, his regular greeting should suffice as an introduction. Stanhope is the kind of comic for whom positive thinking is like a foreign language. He sees precious little good in the world, and no prospect for improvement – all that there is left to do is drink, smoke, swallow as many mind-altering substances as possible and spend the rest of the time howling at the moon. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he’s found a ready audience in the UK, where we’ve traditionally been happier to embrace this kind of half-cut nihilism than our cousins across the Atlantic. He’s back over for a string of dates where he’ll no doubt continue to propound his utterly uncompromising view of the world; expect to be offended by some of it, but also enlightened by some deeply unpalatable truths.
O2 Academy Glasgow, Fri; touring to 17 Oct
Tom Parry: Yellow T-Shirt, London
It’s a tough life being part of a sketch group. You may have the benefits of mutual support and solidarity, but you also have to split the money, and promoters don’t pay sketch groups any more than individual stand-ups. Whether it’s purely for financial reasons, or as part of a drive to explore their creativity, you see plenty of troupe members forging parallel solo careers. Liam Williams’s own shows are arguably more renowned than his work with Sheeps, while Naz Osmanoglu is building a big name for himself outside WitTank. Tom Parry has been at the heart of Pappy’s (the team behind BBC3 sitcom Badults) for more than 10 years; now he’s setting out on his own. Any Pappy’s fans will be familiar with his exuberant, overgrown manchild persona, and he gives full vent to it here, with a deceptively ramshackle hour of extraordinary costume changes, deeply silly impressions and lots of shouting.
Downstairs, Soho Theatre, W1, Tue to 3 Oct
Frisky & Mannish: Just Too Much, On tour
When you talk about comedy generating a party atmosphere, you generally imagine a carnival of beery laddism. Frisky & Mannish bring the carnival, but there’s nothing laddish about their approach. A wildly over-the-top, gloriously camp world – where trashy pop is king and sincerity is hugely overrated – Laura Corcoran and Matthew Floyd Jones’s shows are centred around some brilliantly realised take-offs of the music scene. The jumping-off point for Just Too Much is the idea that the duo are on the verge of splitting up. All that’s left is to act out their dysfunction onstage and try to outperform each other. It’s a hilarious send-up of every famous intra-band squabble, from the Beatles to One Direction. Whatever they say, it seems unlikely that this will be the last time we see them.
