Comedy: Clever Stuff

Train your brain with laughs at The Old Market that will make you think, despite yourself

Sometimes ‘funny’ is more than just, well, ‘funny’. The same way that Bill Hicks is credited with making a generation think about things from a different direction, the way that Charlie Brooker might write a dark zombie comedy that’s also a comment on the nature of voyeurism as mind-numbing entertainment, and the way Dara O’Briain makes maths interesting on Dave – funny can communicate more than simply where the pressure points are for laughter.

This month sees The Old Market play host to a couple of ‘Funny Plus’ shows, from the folk that brought us Festival Of The Spoken Nerd last year. WARNING! Contains Nerdity (Tuesday 16 September) is the brainchild of Helen Arney – comedy songstress and science lady. Arney plays host to a varied line-up including Tom Scott (comedian, presenter, language geek), Seb Lee-Delisle (digital artist, laser fanatic and live programmer extraordinaire) and McNeil & Pamphilon Go 8-Bit! (giant interactive video games from the sketch comedy superstars).

It can challenge the new beliefs of science, too

If comedy was where the hard questions were first asked of the establishment, with jesters and fools speaking the scary truth to their rulers, then these science entertainers are continuing the tradition. Asking challenging questions through satire and farce doesn’t just have to challenge the old beliefs of religion. It can challenge the new beliefs of science, too. And those need just as delicate a touch.

The second show at The Old Market pushing those buttons is Matt Parker: Now In 4D (Thursday 23 September) – a performer who has frequently enlightened me to the fact that my brain can do things I’d written it off for years ago. He’s a maths comic, and as much as that sounds oxymoronic, everything I’ve seen him in has had me grinning, laughing and thinking all the way through. He’s just a delight.

An old hand at pushing ideas buttons through stand-up is, of course, Rob Newman. With his last show challenging the established believed history of the West and its relationship with oil, his new show questions the very development of the species and the theories that have long surrounded that. Rob Newman’s New Theory Of Evolution (Thursday 23 October) asks the biggest of all the questions, and comes up with some rarely heard answers.

So … comedy. Not just full of knob gags.