Natalie Haynes

Standups on why they quit comedy

She may be one of the favourites for this year's Edinburgh Comedy awards, but Hannah Gadsby is about to call time on her career. Here, Gadsby, Patrick Marber, Natalie Haynes and Simon Fanshawe explain why they hung up their microphones.

Why female coppers are the making of No Offence

DC Kowalska is a maverick and DI Deering is a glorious monster of a boss. It just so happens, both are women.

Britain's female comedians have never had it so good

The number of people buying tickets has increased by 700 per cent since 2009. But stand-up Natalie Haynes explains why it's still a tough gig.

Monty Python reinvented British comedy

Michael Palin is typically self-deprecating about the Pythons' work. Their gleaming jewels more than make up for any 'dross'.

The Robin Ince three minute interview

Stand-Up comic Robin Ince isn't a name dropper. So Martin Walker will do some for him. In a 25 year long career he's worked with the likes of Chris Addison, Richard Dawkins, Ricky Gervais, Stewart Lee, Josie Long, Natalie Haynes, and (gulp) Brian Cox. He's currently touring his show, Robin Ince: In and Out of His mind.

Radio Times review

You know how the best way to spoil a joke is to explain it? Well, here comic and critic Natalie Haynes looks at attempts to write mathematical algorithms to create chuckles.

She hears recordings created by Graeme Ritchie at the University of Aberdeen and David Matthews of the University of Edinburgh, who have both written algorithms to generate simple jokes. Haynes places their attempts at computational comedy in the wider context of a society increasingly reliant on algorithms: from stock market trading to online dating.

In the end, though, as humans can't explain what's funny, what chance some computer code?

Jonathan Creek: Natalie Haynes's guide to TV detectives

The magician-turned-sleuth is a modern-day Victorian gentleman detective - more about solving seemingly impossible puzzles than catching criminals.

Wordaholics was billed as a new comedy game show about the mystery and majesty of, yes you guessed it, words. With Gyles Brandreth in the chair, it was no surprise to hear Stephen Fry was on the panel, for the show certainly had similarities with TV's superior QI.

Sometimes Brandreth's smugness is a little over the top for my taste, but his endless enthusiasm for the subject matter did rub off. The obvious intellectual competitiveness, particularly between Fry and broacaster/comedian Natalie Haynes, also pepped up proceedings, and there was the added bonus that by the end of the half hour I had learned what a Melton Pad and a Piccadilly Weeper was - just in case I get asked at a dinner party in the near future.

On the radio, this event had all the appeal of a party next door, full of people laughing uproariously at each other for no reason perceptible to anyone not actually present. Tim Minchin, the host, lacked any facility to describe to his radio audience what was going on. Papier mâché horses' heads were mentioned, ditto lavatory seats and plungers, none of them visible, audible or worth imagining. Kit and The Widow came on, making fun of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Stephen Sondheim but not very well. A melancholy song about pollution followed, then soprano Susan Bullock joined them for what was described as curry-oke, a singalong version of Nessun Dorma which was said to be in Punjabi and sounded quite astonishingly patronising and racist.

The interval talk was a bit better, but not much. Comedians Natalie Haynes and Steve Punt talked about comedy in literature, acting out one little scene from Aristophanes and another from Shakespeare badly enough to contradict their claims that, this way, they made sense. The Prom second half began with one of those pastiche piano pieces that meander from parody to parody, Rachmaninov to Tchaikovsky to Gershwin to Nino Rota to Pop Goes the Weasel and Roll Out the Barrel. All praise to the BBC Concert Orchestra for playing throughout with gusto and good humour. Curses on everyone else who took part in this grim exercise in condescension.

Comedy shows are no place for children

Is the Edinburgh Festival finally embracing its smutty side?