Coffee-Table Notes

If things had worked out differently, Sam Simmons might have ended up becoming a zoo-keeper. As it is, the thirty-something Australian has spent the last decade or so travelling the world as a self-styled professional idiot, brandishing an off-kilter brand of comedy that has confused and confounded many, even as it has reeled in critical acclaim and ever-larger audiences. With his 2014 show, Death of A Sails-Man, being nominated for the Fosters Edinburgh Comedy Award following a previous nomination in 2011 for Meanwhile, Simmons returns this year with Spaghetti For Breakfast. This latest one-man extravaganza, which has already scooped the Underbelly Adelaide Award and the Melbourne International Comedy Festival Award for Best New Show, may take a nod at the inner world of its creator's psyche, but it still allows full vent for his inner dickhead to explode into primary-coloured life. “There's some very dark stuff,” Simmons admits, “and it gets to the reason why I'm an...

Mick Foley has just arrived in Tampa Bay, Florida, and is kicking his heels before he starts work.  What that means for the American wrestling legend turned stand-up comedian is literally showing some younger guys the ropes at a 'developmental group' run by WWE, the big-league wrestling promoters Foley has recently rejoined after several years on the independent circuit. In the meantime, what's keeping him amused is a real-life story that came straight out of Tampa, but which sounds truly stranger than fiction. In-between laughs, Foley christens the protagonist of the incident, which hit world headlines, “Bath-Salts Man.” Bath-Salts Man, it seems, was the Tampa drug addict who, according to Foley, was so high on the amphetamine-based drug known as bath-salts that he ran naked from the woods and “ended up eating most of his room-mate's face off. They've donated his brain to science so we can learn from our mistakes.” While the story didn't quite pan out the way F...

For a stand-up comedian to pen a late-night Fringe play about literature’s greatest double act isn’t the most obvious career move. Then again, Stewart Lee’s 20 year career hasn’t exactly steered the usual path of a generation of comics weaned on the ‘comedy is the new rock n roll’ maxim. Having directed and co-wrote Jerry Springer – The Opera, moonlighted as a music journalist and just made his debut as a fiction writer in a collection of short stories based on songs by The Fall, Johnson And Boswell – Late But Live is a suitably single-minded excursion into drama. Here were two men, after all, who went about things in very different ways. Where Dr Johnson confounded people’s expectations of how a man of letters should behave, Boswell, like some historical equivalent of music journalist legend Lester Bangs, preferred to print the myth. Lee had read Boswell’s account of Johnson on their trip to Scotland a long time ago, and when approached to write the play decided to attempt to demo...