Stars: Johnny Vegas

Director: Stewart Lee

Summary: Featuring the best bits from three live shows in Edinburgh and Glasgow, Johnny encourages the audiences to try a bit of arm wrestling, nipple kissing and join in a Wham sing-a-long...

Not content with presenting a straight-forward record of a live stand-up performance, Johnny Vegas creates a story where he is a comedian who, having become a big-time celebrity, finds he is no longer able to be funny. His manager has him kidnapped and continually humiliated and his dignity destroyed. As a result Johnny learns that comedy comes from pain and despair. Cut in with this ongoing story are performances from three of Johnny's stand-up shows.

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Rather than a conventional record of a stand-up comic at work, Johnny Vegas's Who's Ready for Ice Cream?is a pseudo-documentary meditation on what makes good comedy, and how success is a threat to comic spontaneity. Trapped by his own celebrity, Vegas is kidnapped by a brutal de- programmer and shipped off to the Edinburgh fringe to rediscover his roots in humiliation and despair. True comedy, we learn, comes from pain. He is forced to share a room with a truly unfunny comic who wakes him up to tell him gags and forces him to eat baby food; he is sponsored by an ice-cream man, who wants ice cream to figure in the routines; and to cap it all he is randomly beaten by the de-programmer.

Not all of this is remotely as funny as Vegas and his co-stars thought it was, though there are wonderful moments of excruciating embarrassment. However, the routines framed by it include moments of real genius--Vegas at his foul-mouthed, self-hating best. Talking about, say, how he was conned into working with the famous monkey puppet in the belief it was going to be released into the wild is inventive fantasy of the highest order. --Roz Kaveney

Aspect Ratio:	16:9 Wide Screen
Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Special Features:	Outtakes, Deleted Scenes, Behind The Smile, Tough Crowd
Year:	2003
Release Date:	November 17, 2003
Runtime:	60 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	820 912 9
Keywords:	Tour, Ice, Lost, Johnny, Comedy, General, Cream, Wide, Screen, Vegas, Ready, Who's
Genre:	Comedy