Aziz Ansari, London
The intensive schedules of US network sitcoms mean that they dominate the lives of those who work on them. And when those shows come to an end, their stars can be left in a kind of career vacuum, struggling to find new projects that will live up to the roles that defined them. That’s a prospect soon to be facing Aziz Ansari, when NBC’s Parks And Recreation finishes next year. He has played deluded self-starter Tom Haverford for the last six years, benefiting from the smart writing and brilliant ensemble performances that have made the show a hip name to drop both here and in the States. But he’s certainly got a lot to offer outside of the confines of sitcomland. His stage persona sees him appearing as a kind of nerdy manchild, riddled with personality weaknesses and reduced to endlessly baiting his teenage cousin Harris just so he can reach a position of superiority over someone. The sensitive, easily mocked Harris is a genius comic creation, and Ansari’s accounts of their many puerile battles achieve a grandeur that is not far short of epic.
Eventim Apollo, W6, Sun
UK Jewish Comedy Festival, London
There’s a grand tradition of distinctively Jewish comedy on the other side of the Atlantic, from Catskills comics such as Milton Berle and Sid Caesar through to modern-day stand-ups who find their Jewish ethnicity a rich source of gags. It’s never been as much of a big deal over here: Friday Night Dinner – arguably the definitive British-Jewish comedy – only appeared in recent years, the brainchild of prolific writer-producer Robert Popper. He’s one of the participants in this week’s inaugural UK Jewish comedy festival, appearing on Thursday in conversation with veteran alternative comic Arnold Brown. Other events include David Baddiel (6 Dec) and Ruby Wax (Mon); tributes to Joan Rivers (7 Dec) and When Harry Met Sally… (Tue); and an appearance by Odelia Yakir (Wed), an Israeli stand-up who performs entirely in Hebrew. Her show, covering her single thirtysomething life in Tel Aviv, is sure to be an eye-opener.
JW3, NW3, Sat to 7 Dec
Amateur Transplants: Going For A Number One At Christmas, London
A very popular strand of musical comedy involves taking a well-known song and changing the lyrics. It’s popular in the sense that lots of performers do it; unfortunately, very few do it well. But that’s not to damn the entire genre. Like puns, lyric-swaps can be teeth-grindingly awful in the wrong hands, and hysterically funny in those of a master craftsman. Such a man is Adam Kay, writer, pianist and frontman of Amateur Transplants. What Kay has over the rest is a flair for the genuinely unexpected and the slightly macabre (such as when he turns power ballad cliche Total Eclipse Of The Heart into a tribute to bored anaesthetists). He’s best known for his swingeing attack on striking tube drivers set to the melody of the Jam’s Going Underground, but he has only grown in strength and confidence as a writer and performer since then: the new stuff’s even better.
Tabernacle Arts Centre, W11, Fri; touring to 21 Dec
