For the past few years Russell Kane has mined much of his comedy from his fraught relationship with his father, now dead. It's a neat twist then to postulate his latest show, Posturing Delivery, on his relationship with "Ivan", Kane's entirely imaginary son.
If the first rule of being a novelist is to write about what you know, then the first rule of comedy is to be yourself. And in that respect Shappi Khorsandi starts with an advantage, as being herself means she's warm and likeable and the audience are instantly on her side. And when it comes to her material, she started in stand-up with another advantage, in that her parents had to escape persecution in Iran (her father is a satirist who upset the ayatollahs), and for a while the family were given protection officers when they moved to London.
Greg Davies strolls onstage to the sound of Fatboy Slim’s remix of Wildchild’s “Renegade Master”, the “44 year old renegade master,” as he drily observes. From there he initially dwells on middle age and the way his stomach has expanded. His manner is so genial that his gigantic size - 6’8” – is not especially immediate or imposing. Clad in jeans and a black T-shirt he achieves the rare feat, throughout the 90-minute set, of being likeable and funny without ever utilising viciousness.
Danny Bhoy is big in Scotland and Canada and huge Down Under, as they say, but is a surprisingly unfamiliar name to many. I'm not sure, other than a lack of a television presence, why he's not as well-known throughout the UK as he should be: he's an extremely affable, laidback Scot whose brand of observational, conversational comedy is easy on the ear.
Kevin Bridges, an affable young Glaswegian, has had a meteoric rise in comedy. He started gigging at 17, made his solo Edinburgh Fringe debut in 2009, where he played in a 50-seater and earned an Edinburgh Comedy Awards newcomer nomination, and returned the following year to a sold-out run in a 700-seat theatre.
First a confession: I've never been a great fan of Michael McIntyre. He's a nice bloke for sure, works at his craft and is a slick performer with a huge following, both live and on television. Plus - and this is one of the best compliments I can pay to a stand-up because it's a difficult skill to pull off - he's one of the best MCs in the business. But I can't get past the feeling that some of his material, to borrow shamelessly from another context, has the whiff of previously used about it.
James Acaster has certainly been studying his craft since he made his Fringe debut with an unmemorable show last year, and it shows in Prompt. Lots of comedy tropes are utilised, some of them to great effect, while others feel simply mechanical. He uses repetition, callbacks, audience participation in a show full of whimsy and the most surprising subjects for comedy.
Tony Law, Canadian by way of Trinidad and Tobago, has been kicking around the comedy circuit for several years with a style of madcap humour that many have delighted in but others have found self-indulgent. But with Maximum Noonsense he has retained all the free-flowing joy of his comedy while reining in some of the slacker elements. It's a marvellous concoction of silliness and sly humour.
Everybody will be familiar with Tommy Sheridan's story, and not necessarily because they closely follow Scottish politics at their most internecine. Rather because the Glaswegian socialist went from being barely a paragraph in broadsheets to being plastered over the front pages of tabloids after a series of revelations – which he strongly denies – about visiting swingers' clubs.
Les Dennis may have started his career as a comic, and then as a presenter of cheesy, family-friendly television game shows, but of late he has been plying his trade as a very decent actor. And so it proves again in Tony Staveacre's one-man play about a washed up Liverpudlian club comic.