The comedy industry is hardly notorious for being good for your mental health. The uncertainty of spending lots of time away from home, performing for not enough money in the hope of gaining the approval of strangers, all in the slightly more vague hope that it will progress your career somehow, is perhaps not what most people envisage as a dream job.
Davies plays a neat trick on his liberal arts festival audience.
He is some kind of ethnic – but he won’t tell use what kind. So we know he’s Asian –but he variously claims to be Korean, Malaysian, Japanese and Taiwanese.
The audience is desperate for an origin story – but Davies keeps it tantalisingly out of reach – until the end – when he reveals something that is comically unlikely.
The winner of the BBC Introducing Radio 4 Comedy Award Final has been revealed in the BBC Tent and at the Edinburgh Fringe.
Mark Watson (pictured) compered the final which featured Janine Harouni, Hannah Platt, Josh Jones, Donald Alexander and Mo Omar.
Previous finalists include Lee Mack and Peter Kay. Last year's winner was Glaswegian stand-up Stephen Buchanan.
And the winner this year, following in the footsteps of previous winners Rhod Gilbert, Lucy Beaumont and Alan Carr, is Janine Harouni.
There were five acts in this year's final, which made it a tight, fast-paced show: "I sound like this because I'm from New York," said first finalist Janine Harouni, who has already been receiving rave reviews for her solo full-length debut on the Edinburgh Fringe. Her short but sweet set here cherry picked some of her best gags, as she compared her parents to the Sopranos but without the crime or the excitement.
Wearing a red satin smoking jacket and waving a long scarlet feather Troy Hawke sashays onto the stage and fixes his audience with a steely gaze.
This misguided aristocrat, the creation of comic Milo McCabe, has important information to discharge to his audience.
Channel 4 has ordered a one-off pilot from Rumpus Media fronted by comedian and proud fan of regional Britain, Tom Allen. Tom Allen Goes To Town (working title) will see Allen celebrating different towns in the UK as he hosts an as-live comedy entertainment show from an iconic local venue. In front of an audience made up of local characters he’s met over the week, "it’s set to be a heart-warming and funny love letter to regional Britain, celebrating real people in beautiful, unsung places."
Phoebe Robinson is a name very much on the rise in America. As half of the podcast 2 Dope Queens her candid, full-on brand of humour has won millions of fans and it has just been announced that she is to get her own chat show on Comedy Central. She probably doesn't need to make her UK debut at the Edinburgh Fringe to give her profile a boost.
Last year the Edinburgh Comedy Awards Best Show shortlist consisted of seven shows. It was pretty clear early on that the ultimate winner Rose Matafeo was one of the front runners. I've been at this year's Edinburgh Fringe for well over a week now, spending most of my days (and nights) in dark sweaty rooms hunting out the best shows on offer. I would say straight away that the standard has been incredibly high. Attendances have seemed pretty good too to me. I'd say I've only seen one real dud and I certainly won't name that here.
A few years ago Milo Edwards made the news when it was reported that this Cambridge graduate had become an unlikely stand-up star in Russia. In Pindos – an all-purpose Russian word for American which now tends to mean "foreigner" – he tells the story of his flirtation with Soviet superstardom and how it is not what it is cracked up to be.
The date has been revealed for the next series of Taskmaster.
It will return to Dave from Wednesday 4th September for a ninth series once again fronted by Greg Davies. In one hand he brandishes his sparkling golden face-trophy, in the other sits Little Alex Horne, his ever-popular personal secretary.
This season’s hopefuls are David Baddiel, Ed Gamble, Jo Brand, Katy Wix and Rose Matafeo.
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