Comedy double

Get yourself a coffee, settle down, and then place the coffee safely away from the kb…

Two clips from the London Comedy Store this morning, the first’s a very funny routine from British standup Ian Stone (who you may have caught on Mock The Week) proving that Zionism can be funny:

…the second’s from Indian comic Papa CJ, who’s new to me at least and although a bit blue – but then I’m a great-aunt now and must uphold great-auntian dignity, so I would say that – he’s still very funny, if a little raw and tentative in parts. (This clip is much less SFW than the first and is ten minutes long too, so you might want to save it for later.)

I had to walk away from the computer and get out of the house yesterday because I was so incandescent with impotent rage after having listened to Tony Blair’s delusional interview with John Humphreys on Radio 4’s Today. It was go out or smash something, so sorry for the light posting. I’ll try and make up for it today, starting with a couple of comedy clips.

One of the British programmes that I miss most from Channel 4 is “Bremner Bird & Fortune”. Non-Ukians may know Bremner from his appearances on QI, and John Bird from his double act on Absolute Power with Stephen Fry, which may well be my favourite comedy of all time. There’s not a lot of clips available, but here’s one of the best, from just before Israel bombed Lebanon last year.

Bird and Fortune have been a driving force in British satire since the late fifties – that’s nearly fifty years. Sharper than ever with a phenomenally long memory for political absurdity they’re still going strong and they’re arguably even funnier now then they were then. Their speciality is the two-hander (see above) in which a government or corporate stooge is demolished with impeccably courteous yet deadly logic.

Sticking to the middle-eastern theme, today’s bonus clip is an hilarious set from British-Iranian standup comic Omad Djalili: if you’re wondering why he looks so familiar, that’ll be because he’s made a massive fortune playing the all-purpose generic middle-eastern baddie in more Hollywood movies than you’d care to count. So who had the last laugh there?

Enjoy. We need all the laughs we can get just now.