Comedy

Edinburgh seems underpopulated this year. The whisky bars are half full and the throngs of tourists who usually crowd the roadways haven’t materialised. There’s a sharp chill in the air too. Anoraks and hats are worn all day, and anyone eating outdoors in the evening is dressed for base camp. Perhaps tourists don’t want to travel because they’re too depressed. That’s the specialism of Dr Benji Waterhouse, an NHS shrink, who writes and performs comedy about his patients. Dr Benji is an attractive presence on stage with his crumpled Oxfam clothes and his dreamy, half-shaven look. He could be the guy who tunes up U2’s guitars. His act is very funny and it contains some amazing revelations.

Every day my inbox fills with stories of panic, madness and despair. The Edinburgh Fringe is upon us and the publicists are firing off emails begging critics to cover their shows. If the festival is a national X-ray, this year’s image is shadowed by emotional frailty and a distinct sense of humour failure. The brochure is full of performers advertising their mental disorders (ADHD, OCD, PTSD, and so on), as if they were badges of achievement. The chair and chief executive of the Fringe say that the festival means ‘giving yourself over to the (safe) hands of our performers allowing yourself to be swept away by their creativity’. The word ‘safe’, in brackets, assures nervous visitors that their mental wellbeing won’t be jeopardised.

The death on Saturday of the musician, humorist and mathematician Tom Lehrer at the impressive age of 97 brings a near-end to a great American tradition of edgy, sometimes almost-unsayable satire amongst a postwar generation of New York’s Jews. Only Mel Brooks and Woody Allen are still carrying the torch, and neither of them are young men. Still, for all of their impressive achievements, it is hard to equal Lehrer’s unfathomable genius at his peak. Equally stunning is the realization that this peak only spanned around a decade: he recorded two studio albums in 1953 and 1959, and three live albums between 1959 and 1965. Yet the songs that he wrote remain extraordinary, giddy delights, combining tuneful arrangements with “did-he-really-say-that?” lyrics.

The Four Seasons is one of those shows you notice in the ‘Top TV Programmes on Netflix’ section, see it’s some kind of glossy romantic comedy starring American actors you’ve vaguely heard of, and skip past quickly in search of something with zombies or subtitles. This would be a mistake though because, at least if you are of a certain age, you’re really going to enjoy it. I think the litmus test is whether you’re old enough to remember the 1981 Alan Alda film on which it is based, which I do, just about, vaguely. It’s that kind of movie where a bunch of old friends who have been holidaying together regularly since university – does anyone actually do this? – are discombobulated by and rebond over a traumatic event.

Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco is a period piece from 1959. It opens with the invasion of a French village by a herd of rhinoceroses. This paranormal event is never explained. In Act Two, the villagers start to imagine that they’ve become rhinoceroses and changed species. But one plucky sceptic, who defies conformity, refuses to swap his human character for an animal alternative. That’s it. Ionesco is offering the same arguments about peer-group pressure that Arthur Miller made with far more grace, artistry and psychological penetration in The Crucible. The show can’t decide what register to aim for and the cast are dressed in a mishmash of cheap costumes. Some wear white coats like asylum orderlies and some are in Primark expendables.

‘What will it take to make Richard Ayoade laugh?’ If you find this question about as enticing as ‘Whose turn is it to deworm the cat?’ or ‘What is Keir Starmer’s favourite plant-based ready meal?’ I really don’t blame you. But still if you watch Last One Laughing (Amazon Prime), I think you might change your mind. The idea of this reality series is to confine ten comedians for six hours in a Big Brother-style enclosure and ban them, on pain of expulsion, from being amused by one another’s jokes. One misplaced smirk gets you a yellow card; the next ill-judged titter and you’re out on your ear. The winner, as per the title, is the last one laughing.

On my favorite Hollywood-focused podcast The Town, host Matt Belloni and his producer and guests offer predictions all the time on television ratings, relying on the Nielsen numbers for reference for what's anticipated versus what it turns out to be. Predictions for Saturday Night Live's fiftieth anniversary had it tracking above 20 million viewers — a reasonable expectation given the year-long promotional campaign and the fact that it would be on NBC, streaming on Peacock and on E! Network at the same time. The conversation on The Town was mostly a debate about whether it would hit 25 million, putting it well above expectations for the Oscars. Instead, it came in far lower, not even getting to 15 million — below the Grammy Awards, for sake of comparison.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that lazy journalists begin every piece about Jane Austen with the words ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged’, so I’ll fight the temptation. In any case, the Miss Austen at the centre of BBC1’s new Sunday-night drama isn’t Jane, but her beloved sister Cassandra, best known for destroying most of Jane’s letters. Given that this has rendered our knowledge of the woman’s biography tantalisingly sketchy, Cassandra has attracted her fair share of resentment from Janeites. But rather cunningly, Miss Austen both exonerates her and takes full advantage of the sketchiness: high-mindedly questioning our entitlement to snoop into Jane’s private life, while feeling free to speculate on what that private life might have been.