I imagine there are scenes of panic and frustration at the Fest office. If they have an office. I imagine editor Evan Beswick stomping down a damp, fluorescent-stripped corridor, its carpet tiles curled up at the corners like tobacco leaves, knocking over sick, brown pot plants with his elbows shouting “Ballard! Five stars?! What is […]
Jack Skelton walks that strip of taught razor wire between being clever and being too clever. While most of his observations are well made and well expressed, he occasionally gets too caught up in his own hyperbole and talks about stand-up comedy as if it’s dissident Czech filmmaking or Brechtian theatre. Some of his sentences […]
Simon Pattullo is perhaps the most judgmental of the Skinny’s comedy reviewers. A sense of judgment is essential to a reviewer, of course, but Patullo consistently dismisses anything that doesn’t provide him with ‘belly laughs’, regardless of any other charms. Last year he made me scratch my head by saying of Laura Levites: “If anything, […]