Showing 1 - 10 of 16
Standing his comic ground
B Magazine, Michael Ruffles, Published on 28/08/2016
» When Comedy Central needed a Thai comedian for an Asian stand-up series, they had to hunt through the archives. And YouTube.
On the offence
B Magazine, Michael Ruffles, Published on 28/08/2016
» The best defence is showing you're not offended, and for Jimmy Carr the easiest way to do that is to laugh. Carr knows a thing or two about offending people -- it's bound to happen when joking about everything from disability and dwarf shortages to car crashes. No subject is off limits for the English comedian and TV host who even called himself Roger Federer's weird little brother.
Don't lose your cool
B Magazine, Michael Ruffles, Published on 10/04/2016
» When it's this hot and humid, Netflix and chill really does mean watching House of Cards with a cold drink in your hand and an ice pack on your neck. It's too sticky for anything else.
‘Nine comedians walk into a bar ...’
B Magazine, Michael Ruffles, Published on 13/03/2016
» ‘I’m always introduced as a musical genius and a sex symbol, which is fairly accurate,” Earl Okin explains. “Music is what I’m about, I can’t help being a sex symbol. I didn’t choose it, but music I chose.”
Scales of greatness
B Magazine, Michael Ruffles, Published on 24/01/2016
» Jazz musicians are accustomed to winging it, but Peter Martin really wasn’t sure what he was in for when he turned up at the East Room of the White House for a state dinner in 2011. He and a band had been engaged for a feature performance, “but that means different things to different people” and the details were surprisingly vague for such an event.
A step in the right misdirection
B Magazine, Michael Ruffles, Published on 15/11/2015
» Adnan Khashoggi’s private yacht is a study in gold and opulence. It can also be an intimidating place at 9pm when waiting for an escort. Then 10pm rolls around, then 11pm. It is long before the days of mobile phones and Howard Posener is getting nervous, but a sheikh has flown him from London to Spain and promised £30,000 for a night of magic. By the time the Bentley and six guards have turned up and driven him from the luxury vessel to a compound complete with a moat and underground theatre, it is midnight.
Grate expectations
B Magazine, Michael Ruffles, Published on 01/11/2015
» The defence that cheese “smells funny” never really washed in a land famous for durian. But for a long time it was one of the standard excuses Thais would use when they were avoiding the stuff.
One for the Monet, one for the road
B Magazine, Michael Ruffles, Published on 02/08/2015
» Picasso, Dali, Renoir, Degas, Monet and Manet — I have gazed in awe at all of them. Reflections of moonlight dappling across a river, mist-like tutus of nubile ballerinas, ants crawling across melting faces held up by sticks — it hardly matters whether the artist was going blind, a bit of a pervert or made elaborate jokes about vaginas with lobsters and telephones, they left behind masterpieces of amazing dexterity.
Eating a path through the golden land
B Magazine, Michael Ruffles, Published on 26/07/2015
» When Robert Carmack and Morrison Polkinghorne first travelled to Myanmar in 1996, their $5 each got them five kilometres past the bridge at Chiang Rai for five hours. After some persuasion, they agreed to be taken on a tourist van.
A spice odyssey
B Magazine, Michael Ruffles, Published on 26/04/2015
» There they were, nobody’s idea of the perfect cocktail ingredients, lined up on the bar in five beautiful little brass bowls: cardamom, cloves, maize, black peppercorns and butterfly pea. A deft hand picked from two, dropped the spices in the bottom of a cocktail shaker and crushed them with a pestle. Out came a bottle of gin, one already infused with Assam black tea. Lemon, passion fruit and honey followed, each measured precisely, shaken and strained into a teapot.