Funny Cow review: Maxine Peake"s glum stand-up drama is no laughing matter

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Director: Adrian Shergold. Cast: Maxine Peake, Paddy Considine, Tony Pitts, Stephen Graham, Kevin Eldon, Vic Reeves, Graham Fellows, Kevin Rowland, Corinne Bailey Rae, Richard Hawley, Alun Armstrong, Christine Bottomley. 15 cert, 103 mins

What Maggie Smith is to an acidic glower, or Jack Nicholson to a lewd smirk behind shades, Maxine Peake is to lighting a cigarette with trembling hands, and taking a sharp drag mid-monologue. She does a lot of this in Funny Cow, producing and starring as a fictional comedian in that least welcoming of environments: the 1970s Yorkshire stand-up circuit.

There are the boorish chauvinists telling her women aren’t funny – many in the audience, and more backstage, waiting for her to bomb. There’s a reek of brown ale and desperation in every venue, where dismal comics such as Lenny (Alun Armstrong) take the mic directly after low-rent stripping routines, plying a catatonic crowd with their equally tired material.

The film allows us to make our own distinctions between lousy jokes, good jokes, and the ones that are kind of in between. It’s also honest about the cesspools of knee-jerk racism and other forms of bigotry that passed for humour in the bad old days – some of which even the heroine dredges up to make her mark.