Comedy at Edinburgh: when's best to watch it?

The assumption that laughter is a dish best served drunk is being challenged. Meanwhile, Mark Thomas baits Ian Rankin and Gráinne Maguire elects to go political.

Mark Thomas brings 100 Acts of Minor Dissent to Fringe

Political comedian returns to his roots with some mischievous acts of dissent.

Mark Thomas returns to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

For 2013, he is back on more solid comedy ground at The Stand.

What I see in the mirror: Mark Thomas

'When I go bald, it may be time for the big tattoo'.

Apple shop in London targeted by Mark Thomas

Flashmob singing Irish songs, in reference to company's use of overseas subsidiaries, descends on flagship Regent Street store.

Mark Thomas stands up for free theatre

When we heard that Mark Thomas was putting together a benefit comedy performance for The Belarus Free Theatre we were curious to find out more.

Mark Thomas heads up Belarus Free Theatre benefit

Mark Thomas is bringing together a host of top names including Omid Djalili, Phill Jupitus, Isy Suttie and Imran Yusuf to the Comedy Store later this month to help raise funds for Belarus Free Theatre.

Radio Times review

I've watched Dave Allen: God's Own Comedian (Monday BBC2; iPlayer) twice now. I'll probably watch it another eight or nine times, in the hope that any of Allen's essence can somehow enter my soul. This was less a film about how to be a TV comedian, more a film about how to be.

Dave Allen had a spark, a glint. He had no fear. He knew he had his s**t straight. He trusted his mind. He was always looking for mischief. He was curious. He loved his family. He never stopped thinking. If it was funny, he'd say it.

You could see it as he bounded onto the stage to present his first big TV show, in Sydney in 1963. At 26, in his second foreign country - he'd left Ireland at 16 and left his friends The Beatles behind in England ten years later - he was brazenly flirting with the studio audience. He had it. Soon Australia had given Dave, unutterably sexy at that point with his black hair and charmed eyes, his own chat show, which from the clips in God's Own Comedian seemed to consist of him larking about aimlessly and assuredly with female co-hosts and, in one extended sequence, risking his life to demonstrate how to escape from a submerged car. Advised to stay in Australia and build on his success, Allen followed his first wife back to England and simply repeated it there.

This documentary about one of the best stand-up comedians in British TV history didn't actually contain very much of his stand-up, because what audiences were buying wasn't a series of jokes, but time with Dave Allen - a share of the drink that was normally in his hand, on and off stage. "They wanted him to like them," explained Mark Thomas, a writer for Allen's later shows. Allen's honest independence was alluring but it took him, quite naturally, to extremely controversial places.

The flint inside the laconic exterior was formed young. Allen's newspaper-editor dad, a major local celebrity, had died when his son was 12, leaving the family struggling. But before that, a Catholic education had woken Allen up. "They hit me. They pulled my hair. They punched me. They demeaned me. None of them were qualified teachers."

Allen's material about the Catholic church wasn't revenge, exactly. The Pope stripteasing, the "nuns farting next to lilies" and the rest came more from his fascination with humans at their hypocritical worst. He grinned widely when asked which of his routines about religion had offended the IRA: "Most of them!" If it was true, he'd say it. Allen was a mainstream household name but did sketches about Apartheid, because he wanted to. His popularity kept rising.

Craven celebs would have consolidated with safe options. Allen wandered off to present a series of proto-Theroux documentaries on eccentric and marginalised people, drawing on his equal fascination with humans at their best. He took a straight acting role as a man in mid-life crisis in an Alan Bennett TV play. Allen was "looking for the meaning of life", said one of his collaborators, and that didn't sound ridiculous.

About the only black note in this fantastic programme - which may have glossed over all sorts of monstrous flaws in Allen's character, although I suspect it didn't and don't much care - was his last full series for the BBC in 1990, which was dogged by green-inkers moaning about the swearing. We saw Allen eruditely explain in a Clive James interview that there are more important things in the world to worry about than "rude sounds", but the Beeb caved and Allen was wounded. It was an ironic, pathetic, trivial but illuminating example of what Allen stood against and why he mattered.

Not that he thought he mattered much, Dave Allen being one of the few things in which Dave Allen didn't take too much interest. He made the best show he could but then went home, exchanged his smart stage garb for scruffy linen, and got on with reading, painting, drawing, and hosting sprawling weekenders for his extended family and friends. The ghost stories he would petrify the kids with at the Allen house in Devon sounded like better gigs than any of the TV ones.

"He had these many many abilities but he held them quietly," observed his widow Karin. Allen knew it was just a ride and, as Cyril Connolly ambiguously said, you can't be too serious. Finally, God's Own Comedian dealt with the mystery of the missing forefinger on Allen's left hand, by refusing to answer it. He'd told everyone something different: as his associates related the tale they'd heard, they had his glint in their eye.

"Here lies Dave Allen, a comedy fool/Who drank and told gags as he sat on his stool ..." Allen's own epitaph for himself neatly encapsulates his received image as one of the great bar-room raconteurs, but the Vatican-baiting humorist (who received death threats from the IRA) also pushed more boundaries in his time than the so-called alternative comics who followed. Admirers and friends such as Mark Thomas and Dame Maggie Smith bear witness to his peculiar genius in this fond and very personal tribute.

The best combination of music, humour and real-life drama I heard last week was on Radio 4. Mark Thomas, known for political comedy, gave us Bravo Figaro, his standup show from last year's Edinburgh festival. Since then he's taken it on tour, apparently, though it had passed me by. I feel very lucky to have stumbled across it on late-night radio.

Essentially it was a short journey around his dad, Colin - "the rudest man in south London" - with Mark being funny and truthful, and peppering his tale with recorded interviews with his family. We knew that Colin wasn't well from the start: the show opened with the sound of him breathing and talking with difficulty, his wife, Mark's mum, fussing and chattering around him like an anxious sparrow. Mark performed with bombast and to-the-gut honesty; the show rattled along like a juggernaut. You were breathless keeping up. Every time you thought Mark was showing off, he called himself out. Every time you found yourself turning his dad into a cute character, Mark confronted you with what was real. The story, with all its stories within, was brilliantly told.

When Colin had been well he'd loved opera, and quite unbelievably Mark found himself in a position to get Royal Opera singers to perform in Colin's bungalow. Which they did, and we heard it, and it was great; but that wasn't what left the punch to the heart. That was done by Mark, who closed the show by acknowledging that this was a staged goodbye to his dad, that the real end would be "messy and smell of fear" and would lack the delight and beauty of this, his wonderful, powerful tribute. And then the programme ended and the announcer told us that Colin had died that morning.