Funny Cow review

If Adrian Shergold's film tells us anything about life in 1970s England, the overriding message is that being a female standup comedian was clearly no laughing matter.

Movies about comedy are rarely funny but Funny Cow takes the sad clown cliché to such a grim extreme it becomes almost laughable. Starring the excellent Maxine Peake as an aspiring British stand-up in the sexist, racist, homophobic environs of the Northern working men's clubs of the 1970s and early 1980s, the film around her is such a wilfully incoherent mess it renders her performance all but dead on arrival.

She plays the eponymous Funny Cow (no other character name is given), a battered wife who has apparently found success by transforming the trauma of her life into a stage act that mixes the sort of politically incorrect gags of the era with uncomfortable confessionals about her childhood, her marriage and her surroundings. Using what seems like a television special or a monologue-based theatre show as a framing device, the film deploys random flashbacks (with occasional magical realist flourishes) to various incidents in her life in order to track her evolution from defiant child who stood up to her violent father (Stephen Graham) to self-determining woman able to conquer the male-dominated club circuit with racist and fat-shaming jokes of her own.

Along the way she's mentored by a terminally depressed veteran comic (Alun Armstrong) and meets a cartoonishly conceived bookseller (a woefully miscast Paddy Considine), whose Pygmalion fantasies she's more than happy to exploit as she escapes her brutal marriage to the knuckle-dragging Bob (played by the film's writer Tony Pitts). Blink-and-you'll-miss-them cameos from the likes of Vic Reeves and John Bishop capture some of the sad, broken spirit of the variety circuit, but the film's determination to avoid the rise-fall-redemption character arc of the biopic (even a fictional biopic) backfires. By plotting a more elliptical and impressionistic course - one perhaps inspired by Nicholas Winding Refn's Bronson or the Andy Serkis-starring Ian Dury biopic Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll - Funny Cow might give some sense of the chaos of its protagonist's life, but that's not the same thing as making it compelling on screen. In the end it feels like a hollow and rather pointless exercise.

Review - Funny Cow

Funny Cow will make you wondering if you are crying happy or sad tears by the end.

Review: Funny Cow

Maxine Peake captivates in a film that takes a serious look at being funny.

Why is stand-up film Funny Cow not funny?

It is unfortunate that nothing Maxine Peake's stand-up comic says, either on or off stage, is remotely amusing.

Funny Cow review - Maxine Peake blazes

Peake is hypnotically belligerent as an ambitious club performer trampling over prejudice and sticky carpets on the 1970s comedy circuit.

'Funny Cow': London review

Maxine Peake is defiantly good as a Northern comic working the sexist circuit of the 1970s and 80s.

Funny Cow review

Adrian Shergold's edgy comedy Funny Cow exudes a certain vintage Britishness. Taking place in the 70s and 80s, atmospherically there is a tinge of EastEnders and classics like Alfie.

Comedian Johnny Vegas co-writes and stars with Tony Pitts in the curious tale of Rupert, the highlight of tonight's Sky Atlantic comedy short double bill. Rupert is carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders after inheriting Kinky Ink, a tattoo parlour with a rum bunch of regulars who really give him the needle.