For Reginald D Hunter, nothing beats the buzz of stand-up. The brilliant American comedian says that, “It’s the only time of day that everyone I’m talking to is smiling. It’s the only time of day that people are very happy to see me – I can’t even count on that from my own family!”

So, it’s terrific news all round that Reginald is returning to the stand-up arena with a new show entitled “Facing the Beast”. This spring he embarks on a 40-date tour of the UK and Ireland with this hugely anticipated new show celebrating his 20^th anniversary as a comedian, living and performing in the UK.

Over those two decades, Reginald has established himself as one of the most electrifying performers at work in this country. He lights up venues up and down the land with his stunning, searingly honest, sometimes provocative material. His compelling routines have attracted an audience that spans the generations. He is a stand-out stand-up.

I’m here to tell you that Reginald is just as magnetic in person. Over a bowl of chicken soup in a North London cafe, he makes for compulsive company, and two hours in his presence simply flies by.

Reginald, who has gained a devoted television audience in such popular panel shows as Have I Got News for You, QI, 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown and Never Mind the Buzzcocks, begins by underscoring just what he loves about live comedy. “I adore the interaction with the audience,” he says.

“What I live for is those moments where something comes out of my mouth or an audience member’s mouth that completely surprises all of us. You can’t orchestrate that. That’s when you laugh till there are tears in your eyes.”

The comedian, who has presented the enormously popular BBC2 documentary, Reginald D Hunter’s Songs of The South, and its equally successful follow up, Reginald D Hunter’s Songs of The Border, both of which charted the growth of American popular song, goes on to give an example of the sort of off-the-cuff line that fires up his stand-up shows. “There was one moment where I came on stage when I was lean and pretty.

“A woman in the audience shouted out, ‘Show us your c**k!’ I immediately replied, ‘I decline to do that, mam, because it ain’t that kind of party. Let me ask you, ‘Do you go to strip clubs and shout out, ‘Tell us a joke!’?’”

On another occasion, Reginald recalls, “I walked onstage at a club and asked, ‘How much were the tickets?’ Someone shouted out, ‘£14’. ‘Relax,’ I replied, ‘here comes £9.74!’” It is this sort of hilarious, spontaneous humour that elevates Reginald and makes him one of the most thrilling live comedians around.

The stand-up, who hails originally from Albany, Georgia, particularly enjoys performing in the UK. He explains why he has such a tremendous rapport with British audiences. “I love the fact that they will hear you out. I’m a black man from the South of the US. I was born in trouble, and I don’t expect no game to be 50-50. All I ask is that I know what the rules are going in.

“In the UK, the rules are simply these: you can talk about anything you want, no matter how graphic or goofy, as long as you’re funny. But if you talk about stuff that isn’t funny and isn’t going anywhere, you will be asking the Brits for your ass back. ‘That’s my ass over there on the floor. Can I have it back, please?’”

We are currently going through an especially turbulent era in politics. Reginald admits that, perversely, bad times can actually be good for stand-up. “They make comedians tougher and sharper, if you can survive and you don’t let it shrink your nuts!”

These troubled times are provoking extremely angry debates, and in “Facing their Beast” Reginald will be addressing that. The comedian’s eminently sensible response to the prevailing air of fury is simple: civility. He reasons that, “If I wanted to question your view, I’d say, ‘Sir, you say that, but could I ask you this?’”

He adds that, “There’s no problem on earth can’t be solved between two people by 15 minutes of considered chat – that goes for marriage, Brexit, or the Middle East. These things are easily solvable, but the fact that we have talked about some of these things for 50 years tells me that the powerful prefer the issue to the solution. It’s a matter of divide and conquer.”

In “Facing the Beast”, Reginald will also be tackling the thorniest issue of our times: Brexit. “I consider my team of friends, comedians and writers to be ‘Drama-cide’ Detectives – the name comes from my all-time favourite series, Homicide.

“If I was launching a ‘Drama-cide’ investigation of Brexit, I would advise my British friends to go back and look at whose idea it was. Once you have filled in the blanks, then you have the freedom to decide whether or not you should be mad about it.”

Reginald continues that, “The people who are against Brexit are blaming each other, but they weren’t even in the room snorting cocaine or chasing $3000-a-night hookers with the people who instigated it. To quote my favourite lyric from that great philosopher Eddy Grant in his song Electric Avenue: ‘Who is to blame in one country? Never can get to the one’.”

The comedian will also be talking about how the right wing has triumphed in the US. “They worked out that they could never beat us liberals on civil rights or morality. So wisely, they decided they didn’t want to engage with that. Sometimes you’ve got to tip your hat to the devil.

“So this has been their strategy over the last 10 years. Our lawyer will stand up and say, ‘Crop rotation is not just good for the soil and the crops, but also for the long-term good of the earth.’ The right-wing lawyer will then stand up and say, ‘I love mom, apple pie and yabba dabba-do,’ and the judge will declare, ‘Case dismissed’.”

Reginald carries on: “The right wing has been whopping us over and over with that since George W. Bush. It has culminated in Trump. He responds to morality and facts with anger-inducing, divisive nonsense.

“He can’t get us in the arena of facts and morality, so he’s moved it to a bullsh*t circus where all the laws of gravity are suspended and context doesn’t mean anything. All that matters are feelings, and perspective is greater than reality.”

As you can see, Reginald makes for a terrifically entertaining comedian. His act is replete with dazzling and thought-provoking material.

So what does he hope that audiences will take away from “Facing the Beast”? “I hope that sprinkled in with the jokes and the absurdities is a reminder that we do have solutions like civility and being able to admit you’re wrong when you clearly are wrong.”

But ultimately, “There’s nothing new under the sun. The only new things in the world are mobile phones and the internet. Everything else is based, as it always has been, on money, power, land and sex.

“The people who read Shakespeare will recognise that!”

Reginald D Hunter’s “Facing the Beast” is touring from 2 May – 29 June 2019 and comes to The Lowry, Salford Quays on 5 June 2019. For details visit reginalddhunter.com    

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Ahead of his gig at The Lowry he talks to Carmel Thomason about politics, his mum and being mistaken for David Tennant.

Q: Your new tour is taking on the most divisive topic of the day, Brexit. Where do you sit in the debate?

Kieran: Much as I like to find a nice, high fence to sit on (the views are tremendous) with most things, I do declare my allegiances on the Brexit issue within the first couple of minutes of the show. Rather surprisingly for a London-based 30-year-old working in the arts I voted Remain, actually. However, the show isn’t really about my own opinion or about trying to make anyone agree with me, it’s more about exploring what underpins this perennial ‘Europe Problem’ in the UK, discovering why it arouses such passions, and seeing how we might try to live with one another a bit better. It’s terribly soppy.

Q: With the political situation changing from day to day, could those seeing your show at the start of the tour on 8 March see quite a different show to those seeing you towards the end of the tour, almost three months later?

Kieran: Having seen many of my friends needing to rewrite their shows at the last minute in the wake of major political developments, and possessing next to no spontaneity, I chose a quiet life and designed this show to be current-affairs-proof. So instead of Boris gags it’s all about the history of our European membership and most of the story takes place in the 70s, meaning that I can stick doggedly to my script from the beginning of the tour to the end. After all, it’s unlikely that Roy Jenkins will have changed his view on things given that he’s been dead these 16 years.

Q: Is your show just another political rant?

Kieran: If I ever try ranting about anything the first person to get annoyed is me, or rather the voice in my head that says: ‘You’re an idiot! What do you know?’ I live in admiration of people who can see an issue clearly and passionately and express themselves in that way, but the journey I go on in this show is more mellow. It starts off with me falling out with my Mum over the Brexit result and then dealing with it in the only way I know how – running away to a shelf-full of books and trying to get to the bottom of it all. The audience and I find it all out together and I go through many changes of opinion through the show as my knowledge deepens and the History comes to life. Oh yuck, I just said ‘History comes to life.’ Shoot me.

Q: Where do you find the humour in Brexit?

Kieran: As comic mines go, the Brexit one is getting pretty exhausted now, I think. It’s not that the issue isn’t still important, rather that it’s been important for so long it has become very hard to find a fresh joke there. My solution was to run as far away from Brexit as I could and instead do something about what I called ‘Br-entry’, turning the story on its head and showing audiences events and characters that they maybe weren’t familiar with, but which were directly comparable to things we hear about every day. I describe myself primarily as a character comedian and storyteller. With the first, the political world on the 70s was one full of larger-than-life characters to imitate, and with the second, there was a fun challenge in trying to tell what might have been quite a dry story in an imaginative way. The day I sat down to make a sketch out of Harold Wilson’s 1975 Dublin Renegotiation Conference was a tough one, I can tell you.

Q: Could your show be enjoyed by voters on either side of the debate?

Kieran: I would really like to think so. I can’t be dishonest and claim neutrality in this issue – I took a position and voted accordingly. But I also try to understand the inherent prejudices and the ridiculous aspects of my ‘tribe’ and to see, as fairly as I can, where the other is coming from. I think I also benefit from the historical aspect of the show when it comes to making it for everyone – over time tempers have cooled about Harold Wilson and Barbara Castle, and so people are freer to unite over funny things about them rather than bristle at their Prices and Incomes Policy.

Q: Do you see your comedy as social commentary?

Kieran: Oh no, that sounds far too grand! I’m just telling a story shaped by my own experiences and a few things I’ve read. I’ll leave that sort of thing to wiser heads than mine. At the end of the day I’d rather make something funny than something trying too hard to be ‘important’. That said, given all my previous answers I’ve just realised I’m a total hypocrite.

Q: Do you get recognised more now you are a regular in BBC2 sitcom Two Doors Down and has that impacted on your life?

Kieran: Someone said hello to me in a hotel in Settle about a year ago but they probably just thought I was David Tennant. That counts, right? Global mega-stardom aside, Two Doors Down has been an amazing thing to be involved in, so I’m crossing my fingers for a fifth series and another barrage of kisses from Cathy. (One for that fans, that.)

Q: Which do you prefer, acting or stand-up?

Kieran: Time to climb back onto that fence! I love them both and each comes with its own joys and curses. With acting, you get to meet new people, be part of a creative team, inhabit exciting and varied roles, get recognised by strangers in North Yorkshire hotels, and get paid a decent wage. And stand-up’s ok, too.

Q: We enjoyed your Channel Four Blap, God’s Own County. Have you got plans for any more Comedy Blaps?

Kieran: I’m so glad you enjoyed it! I think that’s the most fun thing I’ve ever worked on. Three days in my home town tramping about on the moors and putting on silly voices. It was just like being 14 again, only this time with someone filming it. I’d love to make more, but I need to stop being so lazy and get on with writing, so if you’ll excuse me…

Kieran Hodgson is taking ’75 on a national tour from 8 March – 28 May 2019, stopping off at The Lowry, Salford Quays on 16 March. See website for full tour details.

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Your new show takes inspiration from your back catalogue of material spanning 25 years. How has your comedy changed in that time?

Well it has matured (a little). I’m still partial to a dirty joke which has helped in this time of polarized politics making audiences more difficult to please with anything that doesn’t congratulate them for thinking in a certain way.

Do you still find the same things funny?

Yeah, there’s a through line. I’ve always enjoyed highlighting hypocrisies of the power elite, but with the added ingredient of age and self-awareness I’m now able to include some of my own.

You say you’re performing some of your more subversive routines – how do you decide which ones they are?

To be honest, I had to sit down and listen to all my albums again. Luckily that’s what I do every Tuesday so it wasn’t that much of a hassle (that was a joke, by the way.) It’s actually Wednesday…

Can people request you do their favourite routines?

Anything is possible in a free society but if it’s anything longer than a 30 second stinger, it’s more than likely I can’t remember how it goes anymore.

How do you keep track of all your material, do you write it down?

Not really. I write pieces in notebooks and then try them out on stage. If I remember it then it goes in the act and if I forget then it wasn’t good enough or I would’ve remembered it.

Is there any new material in there?

Nope, that’ll be for the next tour.

What’s your favourite routine and why?

It’s one called “Big Rick” about a new messiah. I wrote it about 10 years ago. It’s a rant done at top volume for about 10 minutes. It’s beautiful to behold but sadly I’m too old to do it anymore. I brought it back a few years ago and just ended up blowing my voice out. I seriously had to stop and take a little rest every night after I’d done it. Oh to be young and on drugs. It doesn’t help marriages or work ethic but my god it makes the hard bits easier to tell on stage.

You recently became a dad, how has that affected your outlook on life?

I don’t turn down gigs just because I don’t fancy them anymore. If you got the money, I’ve got the time sailor.

How has becoming a dad impacted on your comedy?

Yeah, I’ve been writing a lot of material about it. I don’t think I’d trust a comedian who had a kid and didn’t write about it. It’s such a life event. I don’t see how you couldn’t find a take on it.

How do you find touring with a young family? Do they come with you?

Not on this tour but we’re doing a cross country Canadian tour with all the Oz and New Zealand festivals next year so I’ll probably have twenty years’ worth of material after that (or a twenty year prison sentence but we’ll cross that road when we come to it).

How do you see your comedy developing over the next 25 years?

I’d say there will be a lot of prison jokes and harmonica playing after I finally snap in the middle of that tour next year.

Glenn Wool is performing at Salford’s The Old Pint Pot on 2 February 2019. For tickets and full tour details visit www.glennwool.com

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John-Luke Roberts is on a journey to discover the 24 lost Spice Girls. Yes, as well as Mel B and Mel C, he introduces us to the forgotten Mel A right through Mels D-Z. He meets a few pirates along the way and comes across a little-known Alan Bennett tale, ‘A House With Too Loos.’

As you’ve probably guessed, Roberts revels in absurdity. Even the title of his most recent show, now on tour after a successful Edinburgh Festival Fringe run, is designed to cause chaos for headline writers.

As a writer, the Newcastle born comic has contributed to TV shows: ‘Have I Got News For You’, ‘Newzoids’ and ‘Nevermind the Buzzcocks’, as well as penning a sitcom ‘Bull’, co-written with Gareth Gwynn, starring Robert Lindsay and Maureen Lipman, in which he also takes an acting role as, Nigel Mainpart.

After 7 solo Edinburgh Fringe shows Roberts has steadily carved out a reputation as a master of mayhem. His new show ‘All I Wanna Do Is [FX: GUNSHOTS] With a [FX: GUN RELOADING] and a [FX: CASH REGISTER] and Perform Some Comedy!’ is touring the UK til May 2019, stopping at the Lowry on January 19. Here’s what to expect:

Tell us about your show?

My show is a manifesto for absurdism told through 24 fictional Spice Girls. It’s also got 10 too many jokes, 42 too many characters and exactly the right number of plinths.

What happens if you get an audience of millennials?

Everyone has a lovely time, while also thinking “I wish there were some Generation Xers, some Xennials, some Baby Boomers and some over-seventies here, because then we could use this shared experience of a comedy show to see that there is more that unites us than separates us, and start to heal the deep rifts in our society”.

Your act is described as ‘alternative comedy’. What does that mean to today’s comedy audience?

It’s not a very precise term, but it’s a good way of letting people know that this might be a little different to what they might otherwise expect to see. It’s a way of preparing people to watch it, maybe, with a slightly different attitude. And a way to let people who might not like it know that they might not like it.

Out of the comedy characters you’ve created, which is your favourite and why?

In my last show I played a version of the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer – but played him as an idiot who’d had his clothes stolen by a fairy, and who spoke a mangled version of English the audience could barely understand. I wore some flowers on my head, a penis made out of an uninflated modelling balloon and a blanket to precariously cover my modesty. There’s something fun about taking a high-culture reference, and doing the stupidest possible thing with it. “Ee am Jiffrey Chowcer, middy evil poot. A poot is lick a reeter, but moo ee lick to rim! At end of every line ee rim. Lick, lick lick, rim, rim rim”. But this year I get to play a witch, a giant, a vampire and the ghost of an Irish girl who left her country, like many thousands of others, in pursuit of a new life in the Spice Girls.

Is it important to you to look funny as well as talk funny?

The way I look at it, it’s a way to put some funny on top. Sure, you can talk funny and that can be really entertaining. But if you can look funny too, then that just adds more funny. And why stop there? It’s also useful to feel funny, to taste funny, and to smell funny.

What part do props play in your act?

The part they play is this:
Stage 1. I think “I am not going to use any props this year because they are too much trouble to carry around.”
Stage 2. I think “But it would be funny to have a prop to at this point in the show. OK I can use just one prop in the show, because it will make it funnier. Just one though.”
Stage 3. I have 53 props in the show.

Any singing or dancing in the show?

I cannot give away all my secrets – but what I will say is that if you like singing and dancing the answer is “yes”. And if you don’t like singing and dancing the answer is “why don’t you come along and find out”.

You’ve been touring since October. Has it changed much since then?
It’s basically the same show, but there’s always bits changing and new jokes turning up. You need to keep a show slightly fresh for yourself because the audiences can tell if you’re bored of it.

How do you keep yourself interested when doing the same material every night?
Each audience is different so the show always feels new.

As well as stand-up you do lots of other writing and presenting work. What else are you working on at the moment?
I’ve just been co-writing a top-secret radio revival for a beloved comedy troupe, but I’m not allowed to talk about it yet. Apart from that I’m writing a novel about a bee who thinks he’s a horse (it’s an allegorical piece about consumerism and the Lisbon earthquake of 1755) and working on my next show.

John-Luke Roberts: All I Wanna Do Is [FX: GUNSHOTS] With a [FX: GUN RELOADING] and a [FX: CASH REGISTER] and Perform Some Comedy! is at The Lowry, Salford Quays on 19 January 2019. Tickets available from www.thelowry.com 

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Not for nothing is Stephen K Amos known as a feelgood comedian. His years of touring the nation with crowd-pleasing shows have helped him build up a loyal fanbase who expect an evening of non-stop laughter. With his new show Bouquets and Brickbats, Stephen is promising the usual quota of gags and funny stories, but this time around he’s being a little more contemplative about the universe.

“I picked that title because the last 18 months have been awful both personally for me and in the whole world at large. Some things are so joyful and joyous on one hand, and on the other, so devastating. So I was trying to find a way of saying that some days are rosy and other days are downright shitty.”

Across 2017 and 2018, Stephen has lost both his mother and his twin sister, and working through this sadness has given his comedy a different perspective. “I never thought I could do something like this, as my whole thing has been to keep them laughing and not to hold the silence. But I’ve now found out that it’s more powerful to hold the silence. That whole thing about losing people and death is a bit in the show and there’s a silence in the room where you can hear a penny drop. For me, that is a bit weird.”

As he has proved for many years now through touring shows such as The Spokesman and World Famous, on his Royal Television Society Award-winning Channel 4 documentary Batty Man, and in radio programmes such as What Does The K Stand For?, Stephen is a potent social commentator as well as a highly popular stand-up. You can rest assured that he will be looking to tap into the issues of the day during this tour, albeit in his own distinctive style. “I don’t want people to sigh when I mention the likes of Trump and Brexit, but I try to tackle them by using another example of something just as ridiculous. But I don’t mention any names and will try to do it in a subtle way. At the start of the tour, I start off with a script but it will undoubtedly change depending on world events and my own mood. Things are constantly happening.”

One thing that he most certainly won’t be doing is shouting down the opinions of anyone in his audience. He knows full well that in this divided nation, there will be people coming to his shows who will have voted differently in the EU referendum and he is more than willing to hear both sides of the debate. Not all current comedians are of that mind, though.

“I was doing a late-night show in Edinburgh with a mixed line-up and a very well-respected comic just slammed down a woman who admitted that she had voted for Brexit. I thought that wasn’t very fair because people are entitled to their own opinions and instead of tackling this in a creative way you’ve just slagged her off and made sure that she will never admit to anything like that again in any situation. I think we should be able to sit down and discuss things like adults; when it descends into abuse, you’ve lost the argument.”

In this fractured world, how does Stephen stay positive? “I get my positivity from human beings. Something good happens on a daily basis: a text from someone, a stranger doing something nice for you on the street or someone just saying something positive. We all have a story to tell; you might see a façade but you never know what’s going on inside a person. Sometimes people have come up to me after this show with tears in their eyes or wearing a badge for Breast Cancer or something and it’s about being touched by other people’s stories. I haven’t really had time to stop and take stock and think. It’s all about going out there and listening to people’s laughter or their reactions to what I’m saying. At one show, one lad felt confident at being out and proud at the age of 15, something I couldn’t have done: those moments make it all worthwhile.”

As well as making people laugh in the live arena, you can hear him being funny with his own podcast, The Stephen K Amos Talk Show, the first series of which came out on Audible in August and reached number one in Australia. A second series should be available sometime during the tour. Meanwhile, he has plans to spend a few months working in the US during 2019. “I think this is the right time to go to America as Brits are doing very well out there; the likes of James Corden, John Oliver, Gina Yashere and Idris Elba.”

For now, though, Stephen is very much looking forward to taking to the nation’s roads and getting out and about to meet his public. “I love touring and I’m very grateful that people still want to come out and see me because I don’t do that much on TV these days. I try to mix it up and go to venues and cities and towns that I haven’t been to before or I’ll go back to places and play bigger venues. Travelling around does give you an idea of the mood of the nation. Live comedy is thriving and people are coming out to see lots of different kinds of comedy and it’s great that people are prepared to listen to a person on stage saying whatever they like. That’s one of the beautiful things about this job. Unlike television or radio or newspaper print, I can literally say whatever I want.”

Stephen K Amos brings his UK tour of Bouquets and Brickbats to The Lowry, Salford Quays on 2 December 2018. For full details of the tour visit www.stephenkamos.com

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