Barrels and Laughs: Greater Manchester Fringe Festival

This month, Manchester International Festival brings us the Peterloo Massacre, a boxing match set on a chess board, a tragic Scottish murderstorm and Zinedine Zidane, among other worthy and highbrow cultural highlights. Unfortunately, its organisers forgot a pretty important part of entertainment: comedy. Thankfully, the Greater Manchester Fringe Festival (GMFF) returns in July for its sophomore year, and promises to deliver substantial levity with 31 days of drama, music and, most importantly, funniness.

Known primarily for deadpanning his way through musical panel show Never Mind the Buzzcocks, Phill Jupitus returns to his roots as a performance poet with a preview of his Edinburgh show Porky the Poet in Zeitgeist Limbo (16 Jul, The King's Arms, Salford). Back in the 1980s, Porky the Poet was the anarchic wordsmith who opened shows for the likes of Billy Bragg, Madness and The Housemartins, and was resurrected for a free show at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe. Make sure you bring a broom for the names Jupitus drops, but his experience gives his show some great anecdotes, and it is his insightful, silly and downright hilarious verse that is the real draw here.

Being a favourite of Jimmy Carr and Michael McIntyre might crush lesser acts than James Mullinger: the weight of praise hanging over their heads like the sword of Damocles, ready to drop when they fail to live up to the fuss. Or, if you don’t like the stylings of Messrs Carr and McIntyre, then you might doubt the validity of their opinions. But you needn’t worry about such things. You need only go and see James Mullinger perform his own brand of stand-up and begin to believe the hype: with boundless energy and a startling sense of self degradation, Mullinger is fast establishing himself as one of the best acts in the country, and his touring show Living the Dream lands in The King’s Arms on 3 July.

Live drama is a key component of GMFF and, working in conjunction with the city’s 24/7 theatre festival, it incorporates selected new works from local and emerging playwrights covering topics as diverse as a girls’ football team in 1980s Belfast, euthanasia, and diabetic penguins. It's not the cheeriest of material, but on the slightly lighter side of the GMFF theatre line-up and mining for comedy gold in the world of science fiction conventions is Keith Temple’s Suspended in Space. A darkly comedic drama premièring at The Lass O’Gowrie pub on Charles Street (8-10 Jul), the piece draws on the playwright’s own experiences to tell the tale of a star, an extra and an excitable fan trapped in a lift at a kind of Comic-Con event. Temple’s history as a writer for television also includes an episode of Doctor Who in 2008, so he knows a thing or two about the absurdities of fandom. This should be a hilarious, claustrophobic look at the ups and downs of fame, with a limited run of just three shows. [John Stansfield]