Frisky & Mannish is a British musical comedy double act, created and performed by singer Laura Corcoran and pianist-singer Matthew Floyd Jones. Known for their pop music parodies, the duo have toured the fringe festival and comedy festival circuits in the United Kingdom and Australia, and appeared on a number of British television and radio programmes. The act’s name derives from two incidental characters mentioned in one couplet of Byron’s Don Juan: “Lady Fitz-Frisky, and Miss Maevia Mannish, / Both longed extremely to be sung in Spanish” (Canto XI, LIII.)
Jones was born in south west London and brought up in Surrey, whilst Corcoran hails from Greater Manchester. They first met as undergraduates at Oxford University and began a partnership writing comic songs for the student sketch troupe The Oxford Revue. After graduating, they moved into a shared flat in London. In March 2008, at a music hall-themed fundraiser on a barge in Battersea, Corcoran and Jones decided to “mess around with a few songs,” and performed pastiches of “Papa Don’t Preach” (as an operatic aria), “Eye of the Tiger” (in a bluegrass style), “I’d Do Anything for Love” (sung by a young child), and “Come On Eileen” (as a heartfelt ballad.) Their performance led to a “firm booking for an hour-long show,” after which the pair developed a fuller concept and “reverse-engineered some sort of coherent act into existence.”
Corcoran and Jones have written and produced eight Frisky & Mannish shows to date, all of which have toured internationally, and a Christmas-themed show that has been performed at the West End’s Lyric Theatre and Edinburgh’a Hogamanay. They have also played many London venues. Their first full-length show, School of Pop (2009), a series of “educational” lessons developed during their monthly residency at Leicester Square Theatre, was described as “the undisputed hit of the Edinburgh Fringe,” garnering thirteen five-star reviews from publications such as Time Out. Their send-up of Noel Coward and Lily Allen was particularly praised.
A sequel entitled The College Years (2010), based around a central thesis of “collision theory,” premièred at Latitude Festival, and placed second (out of 2453 productions) on Edinburgh Festival Guide’s list of top-rated shows. Pop Centre Plus (2011), the final instalment in their “Pop Education” trilogy, was launched at the udderBELLY Festival on South Bank, structured as a careers advice facility. In 2012 they introduced two new shows, Extra-Curricular Activities, and a black comedy called 27 Club, which delved into the eponymous cultural phenomenon. Just Too Much (2014) continued this darker theme, concerning itself with meltdowns in pop. In 2015, inspired by the reaction to their viral short film protesting comments made by Gary Barlow on The X Factor,” they created a variety show, Cabariot, featuring guest acts and original songs tackling a range of social issues. After a short hiatus, the pair returned with a tenth anniversary show, PopLab (2019), comprising a series of scientific experiments.
Corcoran and Jones have been positively reviewed in a number of British publications such as The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian, although several reviewers have confessed to finding Frisky & Mannish difficult to describe. One publication referred to them as the “King and Queen of the Fringe Festival.” They have been acclaimed for the skill with which they perform and the cleverness of their observations, whereas negative criticism of their act has tended to focus upon a perceived lack of depth to their material. The Guardian identified them as a rare example of a successful mixed-gender comedy duo.
