Latitude comedy review: standup takes over the festival Jul 22nd 2013, 12:14
Huge crowds for sets by Tim Key, Dylan Moran and others show how popular comedy is at music festivals; no wonder standup was spilling out all over the site this year
As a symbol of how comedy is colonising everything, the Latitude festival could hardly be bettered. You might think funny business would be confined to the comedy tent, a sizeable marquee with a morning-til-twilight daily programme of standup. Far from it: you're as likely to find comedy acts gigging in the literary tent and the cabaret tent, the theatre tent (where Daniel Kitson was a weekend-long fixture) and the poetry tent. Tim Key had a running joke in his Sunday set about noise pollution, as a street theatre act followed a troupe of parping musical troubadours passing the open flaps of the cabaret tent where he was performing.
It's pretty clear why comedy is sprawling outside its own arena at Latitude. I couldn't get in to Key's gig, nor even within 20ft of the tent. (Not until I blagged my way backstage, anyway.) Likewise with Dylan Moran on Saturday: half his crowd were backed up a long way outside the comedy tent, craning to see him through gaps in flaps of canvas. Then there's the scheduling, which counter-intuitively sees the official comedy programme end at 7pm – freeing up the tent for late-night dancing, and forcing spillover comics elsewhere.
In any event, it's fun to see comedy in daylight, popping up in unexpected places. Fun for the comedians, too – Key's running joke notwithstanding. "Festival gigs are more difficult," Russell Kane tells his crowd on Saturday afternoon, "but they're also more magical." There can't be many comics better suited to marquee standup than Kane, whose dynamic energy could power the lights over at the Obelisk stage. He's on good form here. OK, so his material on stereotypical Brit behaviour is wearing thin. Comedy accents provide cheap laughs, too – but his take on his girlfriend's Mancunian vowels (they sound as if she's swallowed an electric guitar) is irresistible. And there's a fantastic take-down of Starbucks' derisory concession to paying tax, "which," says Kane, "is like Jimmy Savile coming back from the dead and throwing a bag of jelly tots at the NSPCC".
Late on Friday night in the literary tent, Kane is the butt of several jokes by the sketch troupe Pappy's (who are playing living rooms across the country tonight in the new BBC sitcom Badults). Scattershot indiscretion is part of the charm of this nocturnal knees-up; so, too, the fact that Matthew Crosby, Tom Parry and Ben Clark have created new, Latitude-specific material. The conceit is that they're considering leaving the festival after their gig, rather than staying to enjoy it. This betrayal of party principle sees them visited by the ghosts of Latitudes past, present and future, and the spirit of the festival distilled.
That's mainly a cue to dress up ("this took two trips to the pound shop!") as Florence Welch, Kraftwerk and Daft Punk, and to scorn the fact that this year's main-stage headliners Bloc Party and Texas are, shall we say, a little past their prime. Parry's vehemence on this point threatens to tip entirely beyond comedy, until the show ends with a cheerful call to "be your own headliner" and submit to the festival's mad variety. Alongside this, there are greatest-hit sketches from Pappy's past, including the beautiful routine from their recent Last Show Ever, in which Clark conducts a lifelong relationship with a woman from the audience, all in the space of about 90 seconds. It's funny, but it also makes your heart feel like bursting.
In a small tent in the Faraway Forest corner of the festival I saw Chris Green of Duckie and Tina C fame in sort-of character as the Singing Hypnotist: part mesmerism, part cabaret, part lecture on the power of suggestion. "How would it be," he asks, "if we were as free in our minds as we already are in reality?" Perhaps Green should be signed up forthwith by the Sunday Assembly. This weekly "celebration of life" event (it's not, say hosts Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans, an "atheist church", as the media have billed it) has gone global since its London launch at the turn of the year, but struggles to drum up a crown at 11am in this Suffolk field.
It's easy to see why the concept is catching on, though. There's communal singing (Don't Stop Me Now by Queen) and sermons by visiting speakers (including, on this occasion, the Guardian's Hadley Freeman). The idea – as with Green's hypnotist – is to be both entertaining and meaningful. Performance poet Mike Garry provides the highlight, his poem What Me Mam Taught Me strutting the line between funny and, in its consideration of what we're here for and to whom we owe it, profound. After his act, we end with a moment's silence to consider how lucky we are to be at Latitude. I'll drink cider from a paper cup to that.
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