ComedyClick here to listen to an audio track of ALK's comedy>>
“Her stand-up is startlingly good. She works the audience and makes the most of her cleverness with words, her knack for seeing things freshly. She has a great riff about people scraping moss off each other every morning in Scotland, but the audience seems most to enjoy the material about pubic hair. I learn that her father was from Birmingham and her mother from North Wales, that they went to Australia but then came back to Dundee before she was born and that they split up when she was quite small, which is more information than she ever appears to have divulged in an interview.”
The Guardian
“assertive, well-timed and pretty damn funny”
(Metro)
“The comics the world remembers, such as Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor and Bill Hicks, are the ones who tell it how they see it with no fear of looking ridiculous. In her own way… Kennedy is taking the same risks and attempting the same clarity of vision… a strong new comic voice.”
Sunday Times
“…it would take more force of personality or comic skill than she possesses to conquer the tricky circumstances of this gig, which are that she is a moonlighting novelist on trial as a comedian, with the audience playing judge and sceptical jury…”
The Guardian
“Sie brüllt, sie flüstert, sie maunzt, sie raunt und schneidet die herrlichsten Grimassen, Schnuten und Gesichter. Ihre Arme fliegen, das Mikro fest in der Hand wie ein routinierter Poststar, sie zeigt auf uns. Du da, Blondkopf, mit der Brille, wie heißt du? Peter, also wenn ich mich jetzt nackt hier hinlege, was manchmal zum Finale meines Auftritts passiert, und Peter liegt nackt auf mir drauf, vergleichen wir da vielleicht unsere Körpergrößen? Es komme auf die Geschwindigkeit der Teile an: 15 Meilen pro Stunde, das ist Sex!” Berliner Zeitung
There’s nothing like bucking the trend – a number of comics have made the transition into more and less serious prose. A.L.Kennedy made the transfer in the opposite direction in 2005, delighting a few members of the press and hugely annoying many. And national broadsheets did indeed demand free tickets for open mike nights (the tickets were only a quid in the first place) and considerably more hooha than was strictly necessary ensued. Things are a little more sensible now, the gigging has continued and much fun has been had amongst the people who pay for their tickets in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Berlin, Stockholm, London, Aberdeen, Hastings and some other places.
A.L.Kennedy now has a resident support spot in the Wicked Wenches evenings at the very fine comedy emporia of The Stand. She does a few other gigs, but is generally too busy with other stuff to perform more than three or four times a month. If you missed the link to The Stand’s two venues elsewhere, here it is again http://www.thestand.co.uk/
For Five years she has also been performing a series of one hour comedy shows specifically about writing. Audiences at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Cambridge Festival, Latitude Festival (Robin Ince’s Book Club), Bookslam, the Berlin Writer’s Festival and a number of others have helped to make a variety of evenings very splendid.
She is currently perfroming “WORDS with A.L.Kennedy” in festivals across the UK after having a lovely time at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. WORDS will continue to tour into next year and plans are afoot to take it over to the US and Canada in 2010.
A.L.Kennedy also still appears at political meetings as light relief amidst the news of mayhem, greed and stupidity.
If you would like to contact us with regard to any of the above, please use the details elsewhere in this website. Increasingly, there are snippets of grainy and shaky A.L.Kennedy comedy video about on the interweb and there are audio links to some of her material here.
The very lovely Sheila and perhaps even lovelier Geoff regularly review A.L.Kennedy in the Wicked Wenches evenings – a link to their site can be found here http://www.one4review.com/
