Comedy

Two years ago, stand-up Paul Sinha based his first solo show on his hatred of the movie ‘Love, Actually’. Now, in ‘Saint Or Sinha?’, he says he’s tackling issues ‘that are too dark to work in regular clubs, such as the media coverage of murder victims’. He’s had walkouts. ‘You’ll either find it refreshingly honest or cringingly self-indulgent,’ he assures us. In stark contrast, Russell Howard aims for ‘an evening of belly laughs’ in ‘Wandering’. ‘Somewhere, in the last couple of years, it’s become unfashionable to try and make people piss their pants with laughter. I love to do that. The show changes every night, depending on the crowd and the way they react. The tricky thing is remembering not to get carried away with an improvised tangent.’ Feature continues

That leaves If.comeddie winner Phil Nichol, hugely energetic, always unpredictable, an Edinburgh veteran with seven previous solo shows and two Perrier nominations littered among his stack of credits. More on him in three weeks’ time, when this indefatigable comedian performs not only his award-winning ‘The Naked Racist’ (the jumping-off point is a weekend of debauchery in Amsterdam), but also last year’s ‘Nearly Gay’.

That’s by no means all of the Garrick Theatre season. It runs, mainly from Thursday to Saturday, until November 11, with five more shows threaded in to increase the total package. The inclusion of Stephen K Amos with ‘All of Me’, Brendon Burns in ‘Sober Not Clean’ and ‘An Evening With Michael McIntyre’ makes good sense – producer Nica Burns says they all came close to getting nominated. Devoting an entire week to the ‘One-Man Star Wars Trilogy’ by Charles Ross presumably has a sound commercial logic. But what should we make of ‘Rain Stops Play’, featuring the stars of ‘Test Match Special’? How does that belong? What next? Probably the ultimate showbiz sporting joke in the shape of ‘The Wayne Rooney Show’.

The If.comeddies season opens this week with the Josie Long and David O’Doherty double bill (Thur & Fri) and Brendon Burns together with Michael McIntyre (Sat). See www.if.comeddies.com or call 0870 890 1104 for further dates and bookings.