UK Comedians Who Should Get Intimate with the Front End of a Speeding Lorry in 2013

unbelievably depressing list to compile, pretty tough call too, i'm sure there's enough left over for another few polls

John Bishop, for his deployment of jokes that Little & Large would have rejected for not being funny enough.

Its between John Bishop and Jack Whitehall for me. Tbf, Whitehall was good in Fresh Meat so Bishop then. As much as I hate to admit it, I sat through Russell Kane's standup special on TV once and it was pretty funny.

Russell Howard is already mid-level CF, and already looks like he's been hit in the face by a bus (the bus is stable in the ICU btw). I'm hoping that Russell Kane 'enjoys' a similarly rapid downhill career trajectory to Kevin 'I once threw a water bottle at some people on stage at an award show' Bishop.

Sarah Millican's act seems to be based on coming across as that middle aged woman behind the counter at the bakers, who will occasionally throw the word 'shit' or 'fuck' into otherwise banal everyday conversation. The rest of this list I've either never heard or, or are too low down to appear on my radar.

this thread is sheer old man misanthropic bullshit

lol not really...all these people are satan's farts and need to die

Fucking hell. Standup comedy is just a completely worthless activity isn't it. If this lorry was smashing through every single comedian in the country I don't think I could think of even five worth trying to save.

Russell Kane's hillarious; a fantastic stand up IMO.

can we do a list of young stand up comedians people do like? cause i'd like to see that.

there are none. i hate young people.

their hair, mostly.

most of these aren't partic young anyway.

Howard has really started to grate in the last few months tho, this kind of post-political correctness post-being funny shtick is default mode for so many DVD churner outers in 2013. if i didn't believe that the yoot of this country had more about them than BBC3 and E4 want to pretend i'd lose all hope for the future tbh

He has appeared on BBC programme Have I Got News for You, Would I Lie to You?, and on episode 3 of the I series of QI as a guest. He also chaired an episode of the 40th series of Have I Got News For You on 28 October 2010.

In 2001 he performed in the Big Value Comedy Show at the Edinburgh Fringe as one of four headline acts,[6] and in 2003 co-headlined a show with Nina Conti.[7] He performed his first full-length solo show, What Chance Change? in 2006,[1] and in 2007 was nominated for Best Newcomer at the Edinburgh Comedy Awards.[8] He is touring Britain with The Out Out Tour in 2010/2011.[9][10]

He's OK in small doses on panel shows, but his stand-up routine is execrable. I would just like to say to him "no-one cares that you used to watch Thundercats as a kid! You're a man in his early 30's, just about everyone your age watched that cartoon."

Think it was Russell Kane I caught 5 mins of on three separate occasions and each time it was 'lol I bought coriander, I'm so middle class!!' 'lol hoummous, middle class!!' 'oooh OREGANO!!'
Can't stand Whitehall's schtick but he was v good in Fresh Meat.

sounds like Russell Kane is a keen observer of the intricacies of class in modern Britain and not just some cunt with stupid hair and a smug grin like i thought

ALL OF THEM

LET'S DO IT

can we do a list of young stand up comedians people do like? cause i'd like to see that.

― piscesx, Tuesday, January 1, 2013 9:06 PM (51 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

here is mine:

Saw Simon Amstell's 'Numb' on tv earlier this week, and quite liked it. Perhaps not stereotypical 'stand up' though.

write in vote for mcintyre and shame on you

Xp That was good NY Day not-leaving-the-sofa watching. His sitcom made me forget that his standup can be decent (although Clive in it was spot on).

i used to love stand-up comedy. i can recite chunks of bill hicks and bill cosby and richard pryor albums and dave chappelle shows verbatim from memory. my first writing job was interviewing comedians for the brochure of a comedy club in london, and remember almost laughing up a lung watching harry hill in a tiny putney pub in 1995 or thereabouts. i can't think of a single UK stand-up at the moment who i don't look upon with disdain. i would love someone to come along and change my mind.

i guess this means i am old.

There's some utter shit around just now, but Mickey Flanagan is a whole other circle of excrement.

agreed, from this list.

I do think it is something to do with the relative age of the performer. I dunno how much time i'd have today for a 22 yr old bill hicks, say? Stand-up, for me anyway, almost always needs to have a strong element of weary cynical truthbomb to it, but i'm fucked if i'd welcome even a high level of that from someone who was in nappies when i was going to discos. It's not them, it's us- to some extent.

you look on Kitson or Lee with disdain?

i'm drawing a blamk, tbh, unless you mean dave and franny

if you mean stewart lee, then no, but he's fuckin ancient, and therefore, from my pov, theory holds.....

"Now, where do you see yourself on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs?"

Russell Howard is describing a 3 year-old being educated about same-sex relationships at a time when he's more interested in questions like "When a jellyfish eats jelly, does it explode?" or pointing to a burns victim and saying "Mummy, why does that man have a melty head?"

(Ten-second cross-section of act selected at random from YouTube video.)

While the sketch could be seen as a mild satire on liberalism, pitting the anarchic child against morally mollycoddling parents, its author betrays more than a passing familiarity with liberal humanist psychology (Abraham Maslow's ideas about self-actualisation). To recognise an idea enough to laugh at it, you must already partly share it. So this is comedy by and for the semi-liberal middle classes. It's affectionate auto-critique for people who are already shilly-shallying at the borders of ideas like "self-actualisation".

This is liberal education disguised as satire. How do you learn about the acceptability of efforts to enlighten children as early as possible about homosexuality? From comedy which suggests that such efforts are already absurdly widespread. Far from declaring this type of education "beyond the pale" it brings it, imaginatively, inside the Overton Window. The audience, not quite with the program themselves (because after all it's an exaggeration), nevertheless laugh because they recognise themselves some way further down a line they've already embarked on.

I dunno how much time i'd have today for a 22 yr old bill hicks, say?
thing is, you watch that recent hicks doc and you'll see that bill was pretty hilarious from his teens onwards.

stewart lee is awesome and hilarious and smart, and not of a piece with this list above tbh.

to recognise and idea enough to laugh at it, you must already partly share it

Weak central plank imo

to recognise an idea enough to laugh at it, you must already partly share it

Weak central plank imo

fuckin phone

xp idk if i can trust you with my thesis stevie, you're post-rationalising yr youthful admiration of the offered pair i reckon (nb yes lee is great, tho i have issues with the delivery methods of hicks)

"You're standing there in the nightclub in your carpet slippers with a pint of milk and a cut loaf."

Mickey Flanagan is describing the difference between "going out" and "popping out". Someone who tells himself he's only "popping out" finds himself standing in a nightclub five hours later clutching the items which were his pretext for leaving the house.

(Ten-second cross-section of act selected at random from YouTube video.)

Although there are no references to Abraham Maslow here, Flanagan's observation about the shades of difference between various self-deceiving micro-intentions could have been a chapter in Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. We recognise in this mild scenario a whole raft of small self-deceptions which are to do not just with "popping out" (a vaguely phallic phrase which might remind us of a certain Friends sketch about too-short shorts), but with sexual and alcoholic continence.

I would argue that Flanagan is secretly Irish, and secretly a priest.

stewart lee is awesome and hilarious and smart, and not of a piece with this list above tbh.

yeah but you said

i can't think of a single UK stand-up at the moment who i don't look upon with disdain.

Lee actively tours every year, Kitson* does worked-out tours and workshop gigs and one-man story shows and late-night piss-farting about at Edinburgh, they both count as stand-ups "at the moment"

*nb to darragh: Daniel

ah ok x'd wires. i'll look him up

i should note, to nv, that i'll rep for jimmy carr as far above the standard in this poll btw

Miranda. I don't understand how people can sit through two minutes of that crap.

FPed you for that

this is a thread only for bemoaning terrible comedians

is that serendipity or what

i know right?

didn't really FP svend, i do recognise that Miranda is pretty polarising

tbrr we turned over to qi during the date scene, jimmy carr was on it were a right good laugh were it were

she is the Britishes Lena Dunham or something

i wouldnt know on either count, but if sally phillips hadn't appeared we'd have caught another ten mins of qi no question

i can live with QI tbh, the format is stronger than the guests

apart from cartoons it's one of the few shows i watch on the reg

herself likes it enough that it makes a reg appearance alright- she still struggles to make up her quota each week, balanced against football (which is often funnier than anybody featured in this poll)

unacceptable that among that collection of mock the week cunts you forgot its cunt par excellence:

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Archive/Search/2011/4/11/1302532987880/Andy-Parsons-007.jpg

he doesn't seem to be on telly much except for Mock the Week tho? which i avoid like ebola, obv

nah, nah, mock the week needs a separate poll where every fuckin entrant gets a free death

when Hugh Dennis is not the unfunniest or least likeable dude on a show you know there's a problem

i think i've seen yer baldie mock the week cunt on live at the apollo or whatever. but i see that everyone on your list has made at least one appearance on mock the week, so rly we don't need to bicker among ourselves when we can reduce it to one true enemy.

live at the apollo can fuck right off n all

http://www.unrealitytv.co.uk/celebrity-big-brother/homophobic-crowd-cause-julian-clary-to-walk-off-live-at-the-apollo-twitter-users-brand-nick-grimshaw-too-gay/

sean locke was an appallingly disappointing standup, as was rich hall.

irish standups would be a poll- standard a fuck of a lot higher than this shitty bunch, tho i accept this is not the cream of uk humour

Comments are interesting on that one, NV..

i can't think of a single UK stand-up at the moment who i don't look upon with disdain

Jon Richardson?

you know, i think he's quite good, generally. but i really really fucking hate the title of his latest DVD, Funny Magnet.

Yeah, I don't really mind Jon Richardson, but I've only seen about ten minutes of his stand-up.

sean locke was an appallingly disappointing standup, as was rich hall.

Agreed re Lock (borrowed Lockipedia off a mate, gave up after about half an hour), but Hall is OK really when he's not doing that Otis Lee Crenshaw shit. Who's that painfully unfunny American lass who keeps cropping up on panel shows? She's appalling. Oh, and any fucker involved in Stand Up For The Week who isn't Richardson or Josh Widdicombe (who is just about tolerable in tiny doses), especially Sarah Pascoe. Get the fuck off my telly.

Oh, I know who else is really bad. Steven K Amos.

My mates made me watch Andy Parsons' live show that was on over Christmas. Urgh. I've had funnier earache.

Google's got a great feature now whereby if you search for one of these you get a whole wankers' parade spread across the top of yr screen

Used to be a big alt-comedy fan back in the days of Sayle, ArnBrown, Mayall/Edmondson, up to John Moloney..

.. who I liked, but he seemed to be on A Lot, so we'd try to avoid him as we'd seen him. And ended up not going to comclubs..

Anyways, packed it in when it became very 'observational' whereas I'd like to be told stuff I don't know actually.

I like Omid, did go and see Jimmy Carr who is very BobMonkhouse in that you have to hate him first..

um, apart from that, there seems a preponderance of "over-confident boyfriend" types.

xpost do not google "wankers parade"...

omg guys this list http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stand-up_comedians#UK looks amazing and i want to do something about it

Omar Ramzi (Arabic: عمر رمزي‎; born June 5, 1983) is the first white Sudanese stand-up comedian and one of the first stand-up comedians to perform on stage professionally in Saudi Arabia and has opened for a number of accomplished stand-up comedians from the US and the UK.

http://static3.kleinezeitung.at/system/galleries_520x335/upload/2/3/3/2301595/poier2502_726.jpg

Austria's Alf Poier. still funnier than John Bishop, probably.

omg guys this list http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stand-up_comedians#UK looks amazing and i want to do something about it

― soma dude (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, January 2, 2013 9:42 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That list shows that if you've EVER stumbled on a funny stand-up in the UK, you were lucky.

shd have done this as a taking sides with Jethro

sean locke was an appallingly disappointing standup, as was rich hall.

Anyone seen a Josie Long show recently? I used to enjoy her stuff but being out of the country for several years I missed a lot of shows (hers and others) and am trying to catch up with a few. Attempted to see JL but felt sick so left after the warm-up and what I did see was painful. I get the impression she has perhaps become terrible?

i haven't seen her for a few years, but loved her when i did. the show i saw her at was compered by a pre-fame michael mcintyre, who i really disliked as a personality, but i have to admit that, as a technical comedian, was really accomplished, and i'm not surprised (but also dismayed) at his subsequent success.

I saw her last year, I found her very endearing - I had assumed I was going to want to stab her in the eyes for her twee chirpiness, but turns out she's very likeable. Not exactly sure she's *funny* though.

i think she's a lot more effective in person than, say, in her comics or her tweets.

The support was this (very sweet and endearing) young folk-singer-songwriter writing earnest 6th-formy songs all about the rich getting richer and it went on for ages and even though I went into the show with good will I ended up pretty cross that they'd sprung this on me with no warning.

her comics are fairly unreadable ime

Avoid Miranda Hart almost to the point of phobia because I haaaaaaaaate watching people klutz out and fall over for LOLs.

.. which is the main category of the programme, innit?

Falling over for lolz is the acoustic guitar balladry of comedy, everyone thinks they can do it, seemingly no one realises it's the hardest thing to do well because if you are a useless hack everyone will immediately be able to see this.

I had to actually Google who a lot of these people actually are. I haven't seen a second of stand-up from any of them except Russell Howard, but I recognise every face because they're all so over-exposed. Might vote for Greg Davies because a) he was the least funny thing about the Inbetweeners, and b) I saw an episode of Cuckoo and was enraged by his inability to pull off that character.

Has anyone shown the Lex videos of Josie Long yet? I feel his viewpoint on her particular blend of stand-up comedy and irritating indie whimsy is urgent and key. NB I hate Josie Long.

i think it's safe to say i am not Josie Long's target audience but am reluctant to pick on her while these guys roam the earth

Daniel Sloss belongs on this list, btw, or will almost certainly feature on next year's version.

My aversion to slapstick also rules out a lot of silent-film comics everyone else wets themselves over, Laurel and Hardy, etc - so it's not an aversion to Miranda-the-performer, rather a swerve around an entire genre.

xp

christ yes couldn't remember dude's name just his horrible face

He looks like the singer of Kula Shaker.

So obviously I hate him before I've seen even a second of his act.

He looks like the singer of Kula Shaker.

Yes! That's been annoying me for as long as I've been aware of Sloss' existence.

It's been annoying me for as long as I've been aware of Sloss' existence. Which is about 25 minutes.

Lucky you. He's been kicking around for a wee while now.

His act is basically "girls won't shag me because I look weird". I remember a time when a gangly Crispian Mills would have been well in demand with girls, so it doesn't really wash with me. Also, he was on Soccer AM a few weeks ago going "oh, I can't be arsed with all the politics in Scottish football and it's shit anyway so I support, er, Chelsea". Fuck OFF.

oh he's Scottish? kind of thought of him as being somewhere between Bernard Bresslaw's son and Little Lord Fauntleroy tbh

Aye, he's Scottish. I was a bit shocked to discover he's a protege of Frankie Boyle's, because he's pretty much not Frankie Boyle in every single way.

Aargh, google has just reminded me of his dreadful sitcom pilot.

i can't think of a single UK stand-up at the moment who i don't look upon with disdain

Milton Jones?

idk, if he's shite then he's a boyle protege in the most obvious way

there seems a preponderance of "over-confident boyfriend" types.

ha love this description, care to flesh it out a bit more?

oh, and that new stewart lee dvd. i snorted through my nose in an arch supercilious way about a dozen times while watching it, but didn't laugh once

few years old now so probably not strictly relevant to this thread (esp as she doesn't do standup) but miriam elia's A Series of Psychotic Episodes radio show is well worth a listen for evidence of excellent contemporary uk comedy (oh and limmy obviously but we've already done that. plus he doesn't do standup either)

yeah but tbh that's as good as it gets 'these days' xp

there seems a preponderance of "over-confident boyfriend" types.

ha love this description, care to flesh it out a bit more?

― NI, Wednesday, 2 January 2013 15:06 (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sure:

Over-confident boyfrield type, current girlfriend laughs at all of their jokes, so regards himself as xtremely funny and continues to say everything with a smile, and gets precisely one big laugh, guaranteed.

Yeah, that's Mark Watson to a tee, isn't it? Except the one big laugh.

haha that's exactly how i picture all the russells and live at apollo guys mentioned in this thread, can't bear to watch their super-satisfied faces for more than 2 minutes before switching over

i mean i can't stomach jack dee's forced schtick but surely there's room in standupland for someone with a sense of insecurity and inferiority gnawing at their core - aren't all comedians meant to be emotional car-crashes? this current lot are doing v well at hiding it

so, so jealous of happy guys with girlfriends imo

hmm

Over-confident boyfriend type comic is generally a) managed by extremely confident LT girlfriend who may or may not produce TV and b) pulls after every gig ECLTG doesn't attend.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/9775706/Billy-Connolly-modern-comics-killing-stand-up-comedy.html

^^^ hilarious shitty telegraph story where connolly's quotes seem to have nothing to do with the daily mail front page outrage the piece is nominally in response to

there's a prize for the person who can remember when Billy Connolly last said owt funny

Daily Mail faux outrage front-page yesterday over the Big Fat Quiz was one of the worst examples i've ever seen of a story that looked like it had been cooked up weeks before. no stats in it and no 'news' aspect whatsoever. show was taped weeks back too. one could be forgiven for thinking all the real hacks were too busy off getting sloshed; not sure if this is common journo practise of a New Year's Eve.

What stuns me is how big this business is now. In Stewart Lee's book he talks about how Newman & Baddiel at Wembley in 93 was unprecedented and now someone as mediocre as Mickey Flanagan can sell out two Wembleys and two O2s without any bother, which is more than most bands can manage and with a fraction of the overheads to boot. No wonder they look so happy.

Flanagan's listings blurb: "Razor sharp wit and no nonsense delivery with a classic working class East End background. He could have been a gangster, or a street urchin... Instead he went off to university and became a wordsmith. Not much call for them in Hackney, so he learnt a trade: being a comedian."

Surely this is the thread that we'd bring D. Passantino back for.

Can he drive an HGV then?

A bus requires a PSV license.

or a man who thinks he can

Hackney has at least one guy who hand whittles artisan spoons for a living. I'm sure it could have handled a "wordsmith".

Although I like the idea that could have been a misprint and he is actually a trained swordsmith.

saw that 50 funniest moments of the year on ch4 the other night (greek nazi guy punching woman on live tv was #35, hilarious stuff). whole host of mostly posh young men as talking heads, these must be the people ch4 (or comedy/tv agents ch4 is beholden to) is pushing for 2013/14, and they were almost all depressingly smug unlikeable unfunny wanks. needs to be a new niche-er version of this thread analysing that shower of shit.

weirdly, david schneider was on it too. couldn't really tell if he was bad or not, that thing about don't argue with fools, from a distance, etc etc

of the list the two i actively don't like are John Bishop and Micky Flanagan, mostly the latter (JB seems to have floated to a position where i don't see as much of him whereas MF is seemingly ubiquitous). that said, i have laughed at MF on MtW when he's doing his appalling accents.

We've mentioned Russell Howard right?
As you were.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Flanagan's listings blurb: "Razor sharp wit

shocking to open with such a battered-in cliche, my immediate thought is 'ok so it's a dipshit with a sneer'

and no nonsense delivery

boorish and aggressive

with a classic working class

i'm v pro-working class, think much more of the arts/tv/etc should be about, by, and for the working classes, but the term 'classic working class' sticks in my throat. like it's a neat little marketing slogan for 'earthy', the bernard manning it's ok to like etc

East End background. He could have been a gangster,

again with the aggression

or a street urchin...

weird joke, don't get it.

Instead he went off to university

so probably not that working class then

and became a wordsmith.

who uses this word? awful

Not much call for them in Hackney,

incredibly insulting and dismissive towards an entire district. i'm guessing hackney is mostly working class so this implies he's turned his back on his brethren, mocking them uncle tom style for the middle-classes

so he learnt a trade: being a comedian."

calling comedy a 'trade' is so grim. real bricks and mortar, not a calling in life, not something he HAS to do, just a simple thing to do for this cynical guy to get where he wants to be. so little value placed on comedy as art, as something that can lift people, speaking about it in the same terms as learning how to wire a plug.

never seen anything by this flanagan guy and really don't want to ever. his pr team have put paid to that

voted for whitehall just because he's the clear shining example of everything rotten in modern comedy. posh connected & snidey

and as we're hating, i'd like to throw chris addison (world's worst twitter presence) and simon amstell (cruel sneering arsehole on NMTB becomes navel-gazing self-pitying bundle of woe in onstage act? nah, doesn't fly) into the pit

addison's a bad tweeter but a funny stand-up. whitehall's an intolerable stand-up but he's great on fresh meat.

so probably not that working class then

this is a dumber stance than anything from that blurb tbh

Not much call for them in Hackney

You mean the part of London where most of the young creative community has lived for the last decade at least?

Comedy promo is engineered for the benefit of the regions, rather than the capitol. So it's pandering to a kind of Daily Mail idea of Hackney.

one of my fondest memories of university is middle class people telling me i couldn't be working class cos i was at university

voted Russell Howard for his parlous influence on none-too-bright 16 year-olds

>> Not much call for them in Hackney

> You mean the part of London where most of the young creative community has lived for the last decade at least?

you'd have a point but flanagan was born in 63 which means he (probably) graduated 25+ years ago...

ah, ok, i should've read a bit more of that page... "a degree at City University, which he began aged 29". mature student. so take 10 years off that "25+ years"

Hackney has been *so* for at least 20 years..

one of my fondest memories of university is middle class people telling me i couldn't be working class cos i was at university

tbf I use to come out with this when people (usually middle class themselves) told me I couldn't be working class because I went to a public school.

if my dad had had the money he'd've probly sent me to a private school. i know that's not the same thing as the possibility of scholarships, which maybe he wasn't aware of, and i'd've vehemently regretted it, but yeah never underestimate working class aspiration and the veneration of shoddy education

Or being told I couldn't possibly be Working Class because I lived in Windsor

Tbf attendance at university makes you ABC1 to yer sociologists and so you do stop being working class. In my parents' generation - first in their families to go to university - they couldn't wait to become middle class and were very proud of it. No one wants to be middle class anymore, even when they clearly are. My stupidly rich, six-bedroomed house in central London, £8k a day when in court, QC friend insists he's working class because his parents were and he comes from Catford. Sorry. You're not.

Continuing my randomised micro-prac-crit approach to comedians mentioned in this thread, I watched 30 seconds of a Josie Long sketch. She read out a letter from Charles Darwin to John Stevens Henslow describing a turtle unique to a particular island in the Galapagos chain. The punchline was that she had Darwin say, after emphasising the uniqueness of this turtle, "and so I ate it". This continued with the tale of a salamander, rewritten so that Long's character twice "wanged it into the sea".

There was a lot of potential in the idea of rewriting Darwin's letters, I thought, but Long's delivery was irritatingly manic and her sense of humour childish and trivial. If she were your niece you'd probably want to put her to bed early.

Tbf attendance at university makes you ABC1 to yer sociologists and so you do stop being working class

dunno if this is strictly true, market researchers still tend to go by job/income rather than educational attainment. and class is a much weirder set of signifiers and influences than just what you do for a living or how much cash you earn.

i don't really self-identify as working class now but if i am somewhere in the middle i'm in an odd place. for every working class kid made good and become a civil servant or middle management there are plenty of outliers like me who never got their shit together quite enough to become properly middle-ified and who still feel happier in the company of working class people and who don't really belong anywhere.

but i do resent the assumption that education can't be owned by working class people, that once i reached a certain level of reflection or attainment i wasn't allowed to be a prole any more.

I totally get that, but working in "the media" and being surrounded by people who DIDN'T grow up on a council estate/in council housing, who NEVER had to go get their dad's benefits from the post office, who DON'T feel like they're the ones being put in the moral cross-hairs when people go on about scroungers on benefit, and who all have that impenetrable self-confidence they seem to teach you at private/public school, I've certainly never really felt "middle class" (although I did feel luckier than a lot of the kids I grew up with, who never managed to get out of the estate).

Of course, such confusion will be less likely to happen in the future now there's tuition fees and no 'full grant', both of which were the only way I could ever have gone to university.

(xps to ithappens)

Of course I now live within spitting distance of Broadwater Farm (and love it) and feel pretty "middle class" compared to a lot of my neighbours. Maybe that Frost Report sketch had it right after all.

stevie you're right tho, there are ways of thinking and living that you never shake off and that always put a distance between you and your middle class compadres

i don't even think i was aware of class until i went to uni and started wondering why a lot of my fellow students were so different to me and my experience

My other half and I always say that if you know what a "toy library" was and grew up frequenting such a place as a kid you can't ever really be "middle class", but again, I don't wanna paint my childhood as even remotely deprived.

That Mickey Wossisname, in a weird way I like hearing someone with that proper old school East London/Essex hinterlands accent on the telly, makes a nice change from constant onslaught of Jez from Peep Show/Michael McIntyre/Jimmy Carr type voices that blanket telly comedy nowadays. But the only routine I've seen him do involved him adopting that "yoot" accents all the kids have nowadays in a long piece about chicken shops that, while quite well-observed, went a bit too far in mocking ver kids for me to feel he was anything but quite deeply reactionary about what white working class kids in Bethnal Green sound like today.

I'm pretty aware that now we've cross the class rubrick this thread will be entering clusterfuck territory before lunchtime.

i was wondering whether to go to a spin-off thread but i think for me class is a big part of why these unfunny twats aren't funny

I think so too, but I'm not very proud of that.

I may have mentioned this before, but I saw McIntyre compere a comedy show five or so years ago and he was technically very good, but his oily unctuousness really made me want to thump him.

even tho Bishop, Flanagan, maybe Sarah Millican, maybe Kevin Bridges, maybe Rhod Gilbert are playing some kind of "working class" shtick i guess

i'm not proud of it either, i don't think i have a shoulder chip, but obv you do still come across eye-rolling patronage situations regularly once you get a job with a desk and a computer

there's a whole bunch of sneering snobbishness in McIntyre's act last time i saw any of it

There are posh bits of South Shields, so who knows re: Sarah Millican..

that's why i said maybe, i don't wanna make that old "northern accent = working class" assumption

that impenetrable self-confidence they seem to teach you at private/public school

I wish that they did, it would have been one useful thing to take from six miserable years, but then again, scholarship kids were the benefit scroungers of the school system, so perhaps I had my working-class-stereotype reinforced from a very young age.

I don't think Kevin Bridges is particularly working class, btw, though he undoubtedly has tons of mates who are.

Nono, I recognised that, was just pondering it myself.. (xpost)

Aw you're probably right Ailsa, and I'm probably being unfair. This is probably more about my own self-esteem issues than any class structure thang, and maybe it just feels better to blame it on that.

scholarship kids were the benefit scroungers of the school system

Assisted place kids were even lower than scholarship kids (although I ended up getting a scholarship later on), I had kids telling me I owed them money cos their parents were paying for my education through their taxes.

Major regret about my going to a posh school is that I permanently lost my regional accent, had to cos of "common accent" related bullying. Made me feel like a fake, but I attempted to lose my RP accent when I left school and just sounded like someone doing a bad impression of a brummie, I'm stuck with it now.

I had kids telling me I owed them money cos their parents were paying for my education through their taxes.

so that's who voted for Cameron then...

Oh, yeah, I totally exaggerate it as time goes by, but there is an undeniable rah rah rah posho braying type, but I think it's more that they inherit that from their well-to-do worry-free families who are more likely to then send them and their confidence off to public school with many similar types so they all reinforce themselves that way. Anyway, Jack Whitehall is definitely one of those.

xposts, aye, me too. Reclaiming my accent was a top priority when I left, except I moved down to Glasgow and now I have a weird hybrid Highland/well-spoken/West of Scotland/rough as fuck accent.

xpost to Stevie

Yeah, but then I identify public school education as posh, and me - state educated child of state educated parents - as middle. When my wife and I first got together, she (private educated, RP) assumed I was a bit of rough because I had short vowels and trainers. She was surprised that I self identified as middle class.

Being south shields, windsor, reading and a bit of havant, accentwise it drifts around all the time. I end up sounding scouse, even though I've only ever been to Liverpool once.

Being a posh kiddie is like an assisted place that lasts a lifetime, right?

My sister and I got (gasp) free school lunches for a few years when my mother was too unwell to work; I'm so glad nobody picked on me for that.

Well they don't usually make that public knowledge (had free lunches all the way through school) - apart from a short period at primary school when they scrapped school dinners completely so you could tell who had them because we got a packed lunch provided and everyone else brought one in.

Class is really a messed-up, subjective thing in this country, isn't it? I don't think I ever really identified as *anything until I started working at NME, where class seemed to be a "thing" in a way it never was when I was at Melody Maker, but that might well have been in my head too. When I was younger, I was really aware we had things better than a lot of the kids I was growing up with, and thanks to my mum clipping me round the ear whenever I spoke remotely "cockney" I always had quite a 'nice' accent.

Education *is a big deal, really. I was the first generation of my family to go to university, and I remember trying to explain what I was doing at university to my grand-dad, who'd made his living installing elevators and was, I think, to some level illiterate, and he couldn't get it at all, while other members of my family were directly hostile about it - telling me that was I was doing wasn't really working, that I was living off their taxes, etc, despite the fact that I was working part-time jobs at weekends and evenings to pay for books, living expenses and everything else that wasn't covered by the grant kids today can't even dream of receiving.

I try not to be chippy about it, because I'm really relatively comfortable now (though, as a self-employed journalist/sub, also aware I'm one bad year aware from serious financial trouble, and have indeed had years like that), and some of my friends who come from much more comfortable backgrounds are wonderful people who've worked as hard as I have to "make it", and are no less "credible" (or whatever) than me because of their schooling and so on. But it can be really galling when some acquaintances talk about class issues and their disdain for "chavs" and so on, and I'm stood there thinking, "on some level I'm exactly the sort of person you're currently denigrating." In some of the circles I find myself in, there's a tendency for people to assume that "we" all share the same experience, and it can be really alienating to realise that people you like and respect hold an ill-informed contempt for people who haven't been as lucky as they have, or that these issues don't count, or that you always feel on the outside looking in somehow. The attitude of the current government (and, to a certain extent, the previous governments and the current "opposition") really exacerbates that feeling, in an ugly way.

Anyway. Comedy...

These comedians with iffy regional accents and questionable w/c bios ought to be sent out to do a stint in the trades. Right you fuckers you have 3 days to do the rip out and a month to install a full electrical/plumbing 1st fix. Probably be more entertaining than their nauseating comedy routines.

neither scholarship kids nor assisted place kids (of which i was one) at my public school were ever targeted on a class basis. possibly to do w/the fact that as a specialist music school there were more kids on music scholarships than in most, but there weren't even any undertones of it. i remember someone i went to school with talking to me once we were at university, saying how she hated being thought of as a ~public school type~, because it wasn't that type of public school (ie not an eton/st paul's thing) (also, she was a scholarship kid; also, she wasn't in the popular cliques).

looking back the remarkable thing isn't that the school was rife with overt snobbery, it was how it insulated you from class as a concept - i can pinpoint so much dodginess that happened on the basis of eg race, but the only time class became a thing was when this girl joined in sixth form and was massively, overtly snobbish about...everything. and then got called a social climber for it.

totally get what ailsa said about wishing they taught you public school confidence! i had to develop that shit myself, i certainly had none when i left school at 17.

any given class label just papers over complexities imo.

in the course of typing that i completely forgot this was a comedy thread. HAVE THEY BEEN PUT TO DEATH YET etc

we're working on that

class as a label is a very blunt instrument but it only takes a minute's observation to recognise that in the UK we have a Byzantine class structure

i love youse guys and your classes

looking back the remarkable thing isn't that the school was rife with overt snobbery, it was how it insulated you from class as a concept

Not taking issue with your recollection, but isn't this exactly the point of public schools- to instil a belief that the privileges they bestow are somehow "natural"?

also not saying that you or others on this thread think that, of course!

yes! that was kinda my point. it would be very easy to entrench that belief.

gotcha, thx

I remember the wide-eyed amazement of someone i met at university when he was told that his estimate of "seventy or eighty per cent" of students attending fee-paying schools was somewhat wide of the mark.

presumably not a horny-handed son of the soil, this fella?

No. It's kind of amazing that you can get to 22 with that kind of lack of awareness but, again, that's probably intentional on the part of schools / parents, to some degree.

woosh. to explain my comment upthread: as someone from a v working class district, first person from v working class family to go to uni (late 90s) i personally didn't feel i could justifiably describe myself as 'working class' once i left and wasn't treated like that by my family or pre-uni peers (not in a neg sense, just treated as someone who'd done aright, moved up a notch). didn't feel middleclass either, some weird zone hovering around inbetween. interesting that people like noodle and mencap react so strongly against this idea but i guess it depends on how you define 'class'. probably best for another thread. but yeah fwiw large part of my comment was a response to the glibness of "instead he went off to university" as if it was the easiest thing in the world, prince of bel air style, money/rent/bills no object

Tbf attendance at university makes you ABC1 to yer sociologists and so you do stop being working class

coincidentally (or not) i did sociology at uni

addison's a bad tweeter but a funny stand-up. whitehall's an intolerable stand-up but he's great on fresh meat.

difference between addison on TTOI (awesome) and addison on twitter (wince-inducing) is horrifying. any good live clips on youtube i should see? find it nuts how he won city life comedian of the year back in 95, before peter kay, manford, moorhouse etc yet doesn't seem to have much of an impression on uk comedy until a few years back. plus he looks so YOUNG

keep hearing good things about whitehall on fresh meat, must check that out

i have to say i caught five mins of addison standup and was pleasantly surprised alright

I find Addison amusing on MtW, so not quite sure why all the hate.

his face, in my case

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Russell Howard seems pretty innocuous to me. I mean, he's not very funny, but I don't hate his persona particularly, and he doesn't come across as one of those anti-PC wanks who proliferate these days.

The right man won

Is John Bishop THAT bad? I guess I haven't seen a lot of his stand-up but he struck me as not-hateable-but-not-funny as opposed to, well, most of the others on that list.

His advert for the "hilarious John Bishop" dvd has a 'joke' that he thought 50 Shades of Grey was a Dulux paint chart. That's Stan Boardman level shitness, yet he (or his agent/manager) thinks it's such a good joke it'll encourage people to buy his dvd. Good enough reason to hate him imo.

any good live clips on youtube i should see?

ooh, i don't know tbh - never seen any of his dvds, but have caught him live a few times, and he's always been quite sharp, and 'right-on' in a refreshing and not cloying way.

Was out with a comedian friend - who came through in the early 90s - the other night. He was bemoaning the existence of John Bishop: "That's what we thought we were getting rid of!"

I saw a bit of John Bishop on the telly, he was mostly apologising for being so massively famous and not quite understanding how it happened. So, basically, I think he's on our side about this.

this has reminded me of a bit of Big Fat Quiz where russell howard tried to shoe-horn a couple of minutes of his latest stand-up routine into one of the answers. wasn't terrible in itself, but what's the point of panel shows if you're going to do scripted stuff. see also sean lock.

(also, i see josie long from month to month comparing at her little comedy night and she's great at that. not see any of her actual shows though)

What does she compare?

Cheap insurance deals.

"Mock The Week", they should call it "Let's Practice"

Lol aldo that was exactly my thought process on seeing that ad

josie's thing is at the black heart in camden. can be patchy.

(woo, website update, i am surprised (it's been blank for months). http://www.josielong.com/my_clubs.htm )

"It's a club dedicated to the obscure, the unsung & the unknown. A habit of staging it on varying days of the week with very little advertising reflects this."

^ understatement.

! I saw the first of those, didn't think it had become a regular thing. Good to know, haven't been to a regular night of hers since Sunday Night Adventure Club stopped.

I would speculate that the hateful vote was split here, allowing the unfunny vote to coalesce around a single candidate.

Dat's Polltivation!

I don't watch much telly (and still fewer panel shows) so I don't have too much hate worked up here. However, I did see Rhod Gilbert do some jokes with a baked potato on the Royal Variety Performance and he was perfectly unfunny, so I would have voted for him.

I went to one of those Josie Long nights once, the other comedians weren't up to much (though only one who'd be near worthy of this thread, he opened with a joke about Roger Federer and domestic abuse...), but Josie herself was v likeable and quite funny in a ramshackle unscripted way.

I think I fell in love with her while watching her last stand-up tour. Very funny.

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-politics/2012/12/praise-stridency

My name is Josie Long and I am a stand-up comedian. I had a kind of political awakening in 2010 (along with most people my age, I expect). I had to learn to cope with unexpected daily doses of anger and horror towards our new government, the Maniac Oligarch Thieves. I also started to protest, discovered activism and UK Uncut, in particular, and met a lot of like-minded people. What I didn’t expect was that it would also feel quite powerful and at times thrilling and fun.

i don't even

wtf

what age is she?

30

she was in my/nrq's year at uni so i think she's 31 or 32

ah no she's 30

anyway she's dreadful

but what's the point of panel shows if you're going to do scripted stuff.

― koogs, Tuesday, January 8, 2013 12:41 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol. most panel shows are heavily scripted. apparently have i got news for you is one of the few exceptions.

even then they re-shoot fluffed lines and edit pretty rigorously

*scales fall from eyes*

i hear Graham Norton has his questions written down for him too

Many young people that we meet feel frightened to study what they love, or even to study at all, because of the extent of the debt they face. We want to reassure them that if they study what they love, it will benefit them and society immeasurably in the long term.

thank god somebody's addressing the shortage of Media Studies graduates

You get a look at the questions + pictures + maybe missing words shortly before recording on hignfy I think – have been hanging out with writer friends who've taken a 'quick, I need funny things to say about this stuff' call from guests about to go on.

Nothing I suggested made it.

lol media studies because what could possibly be worthwhile about studying the media

i know it was the lowest of blows but there's a telling misguidedness about worrying that students will be deterred from taking "Arts" courses as the main consequence of every fucked up thing about our education system and its funding

writer friends who've taken a 'quick, I need funny things to say about this stuff' call from guests about to go on.

Haha. Love it.

(wasn't quite what i meant by 'scripted' up there. but yes, is sometimes annoying when someone plucks a seemingly impossible answer from somewhere)

John Twatting Bishop - can't stand the man, seems like a regression to pre-alt comedy
Russell Howard - I liked him for a while in short panel show doses. His Good News thing gets worse every time I see it. I hate that exagerrated stupid west country stereotype voice he puts on
Micky Flanagan - I like his voice but his material is the worst of bog standard observational pish. He also does that laughing too loudly at his own jokes thing.
Russell Motherfucking Kane - his career has mostly passed me by, no idea if he's funny but he seems annoying
Jack Die Die Die Whitehall - I get that people are annoyed by the posho/connected thing but he at least partly acknowledges that in his material. Not exactly lol funny but there's something there.
Sarah Millican - Saw her on Breakfast this morning. She's like a real life Mrs Merton but less funny. Likeable enough though.
Greg Has He Started Yet? Davies - fucking hate this prick. I saw ten minutes of his stand up on something that was basically five minutes of going "I'm very tall" then five minutes about how Asians are very small and that he's a giant among them.
Rhod Gilbert - I like Rhod Gilbert. Can't remember anything funny about him but he doesn't make me want to switch him off. Maybe it's the accent.
Mark Punchface Watson - undecided on him. When I rarely watch MtW he's one of the least annoying.
Kevin How the Fuck? Bridges - he seems very popular in Scotland but it can't just be because he's Scottish, can it? I find him ok in small doses and I think we have similar backgrounds (West of Scotland mostly skint Catholic falling into that tricky category that's above ned class but nowhere near middle) though we're effectively a generation apart (fuck!).

Have only just realised I mixed up Kevin Bridges with Kevin Bishop thanks to that description!

Rhod Gilbert does seem OK but tbh I don't think I've ever watched him do stand up, just those TV shows he does.

greg davies and rhod gilbert are basically identical in my mind. even after a google image search.

if this were ILM i'd have to run another 99 of these polls now but i think i'll pass, feel free to use this thread for all your "comedy were funnier when i were a lad eeh these kids today" needs

She's like a real life Mrs Merton but less funny

Ha, I said that exact same thing last night when I saw her on the One Show.

The problem I mostly have with these matey chatty style of comedians is that I have matey chatty mates who are just as funny as them, and would never think to make a career out of being amiable and perhaps occasionally inappropriate. The best I can do with Sarah Millican is to think she'd be good company down the pub, and then I'm aware that I have perfectly good company already down the pub and she's getting paid good money to act like my mate. I've never seen her stand-up, but she's a pleasant enough personality on chat shows etc.

xpost Rhod Gilbert >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Greg Davis. Is the confusion because Davis plays Mr Gilbert in the Inbetweeners maybe? I like Rhod Gilbert's stand-up (it's just "isn't [thing X] annoying?", but played out to a ludicrously apopletic level), but he doesn't translate his schtick well to panel shows or anything else that I've seen him in.

Greg Davies is the one who played Giles in Buffy. Or alternatively, has been involved in at least one actually interesting sketch troupe (We Are Klang), which I am perfectly willing to believe he was the Paul McCartney of, but that's still better than you can say for Rhod Gilbert.

Greg Davies did not play Giles.

I like Josie Long's activism. As to above about arts graduates, once you invoke 'media studies' as rhetoric, basically FUCK OFF. Arts subjects mean film, literature, fashion, music, art/design - creative industries are where Britain really punches above its weight. Fashion alone is a £21 billion-a-year industry in the UK. Film? Television? In the long run, if only the privileged study arts subjects, we all lose.

I don't understand what was so bad about that Josie Long piece either. Her comedy doesn't do much for me but she's done great work as an activist and I've never heard a bad word about her on a personal level.

Suzy otm. I did see most of JL's shows pre-2009 but had been warned her stuff had changed recently, wondered if anyone could compare.

(greg davies looks like a bigger rik mayall, as he himself points out)

Re Josie long, I think once you try and politicise your act you tend to use a lot of FACTS outside of context so you risk sounding like a daily express front page. Hard to do well.

suzy i've got no issue with people studying Arts tho i figured J. Long meant it in a broader Humanities sense but as i said, there's something a little priviliged and off-kilter about focusing on access to Arts degrees, traditionally the most over-subscribed, in a country with huge disparities of gender in science and engineering study, and increasing disparities of students across all subjects based on class, race etc

and ironically by arguing for the creative arts in the UK as a powerful source of exports you're counter-arguing to what Long was saying in that piece, which was about education existing outside of economic/career constraints

but once again, there's a million bits of the education syllabus in more danger in this country than the creative arts

thing about lamenting a return to 'pre-alt comedy' as a regression is that it doesn't really acknowledge that alt comedy was just a shitwagon for a shower of unfunny cunts to hop on on their way to getting rich, there's nothing to mourn if alt comedy has died. keep leftie comedians, keep anti-pc comedians, keep 'i don't do politics' comedians, but let's never again laud the likes of ben fuckin elton or alexei sayle just because they're adding the right 1st year debating rhetoric to their shitty acts

The only thing UK stand-up comics have going for them is that they're not Irish stand-up comics or Australian stand-up comics

xp

basically agree with this, the line's always been between "funny" and "not funny", but maybe some attitudes and foibles are fundamentally unfunny?

the problem i think is more about the industrialization of stand-up than it is mainstream/alternative

When it became a career choice for not very good actors

that's part of it, yeah, the pool seems to be a lot more "drama school reject" nowadays

but once again, there's a million bits of the education syllabus in more danger in this country than the creative arts

It should all be defended in some way...whether it is good for the person who does it or brings any money to the economy.

Lets be unreasonable about this..

(xp) who end up as actors eventually anyway having used the comedy as an "in"

xp

as an English Lit grad who's been known to teach film and media courses i couldn't agree more. i was having a dig at Josie Long's twee blinkers was all, really.

as far as the dearth of modern comedy i think it's also similar to the way that writing course graduates are mostly polished in very similar and uninteresting ways

My argument for arts degrees/study is utilitarian whenever I meet an argument that accuses the arts of frivolity. There is also the pleasure of studying something you're actually good at, and the sense of security that competence brings. But due to my own employment in the arts I have to leave it there, and go meet a deadline.

xps to nv, yeah there're individual lines that people will draw, but the skill of the performer is separate and distinguishable from that up to the most extreme cases ime

yeah, but "alternative" *yuk* comedy was as much about "innovations" in technique/presentation as it was about some Footlights socialism

ugh stop stop i'm already dead

thing about lamenting a return to 'pre-alt comedy' as a regression is that it doesn't really acknowledge that pre-alt comedy was just a shitwagon for a shower of unfunny cunts to hop on on their way to getting rich

Fixed that for you, etc.

They didn't change the nature of show business (though they did of course change the 'face' of comedy to the extent that Miranda is being hailed as a return), so obviously the majority of alt comedy that isn't working at the checkout 30 years later has er 'come to terms' with the places available to them if they want to keep the very nice houses that they got out of it. Or they're Stewart Lee.

Finding it very difficult to believe you've never cracked a smile at Comic Strip / The Young Ones / Blackadder, btw.

i find it really difficult to believe people are so keen to cling onto a shonky past but hey

Lee's shtick early on involves a lot of ripping the piss out of alternative satyierrre merchants so i'm not sure why he's in the list. and i'm interested to know what face of comedy got changed? it's almost as if pre-1980 everything was Mike Reid doing The Comedians and not the Goons and Beyond the Fringe and Python and Tommy Cooper and Morecambe and Wise and everything else that pre-empted Harry Enfield's hilarious take-offs of the working class

Funny-looking people. Some of them with tits.

my objection to that josie long piece was the first para, the one i pasted. i'm assuming "like most people my age" isn't a joke.

xps that's all fair enough andrew, except the insinuation that i've laughed at anything from comic strip or young ones- and were i to guess at elton's input into blakadder, i'd hazard a guess that it's all the clumsy, too-long and smug lines that clunk up the rest of it.

ding ding ding. elton started on series 2.

heh well a lot of things changed after series one, but colour me slightly hit

i was agreeing. i liked series 1. series 2 was the start of the longwinded sentences that people tediously quote. and i blame elton for all that, mainly because i don't like him 8)

Series 2 was where Baldrick became the 'less intelligent' one out of the two main characters.

(in srs 1 he ws the smart one)

it's apparently the case that edmund gets smarter series by series as his status declines, baldrick gets dumber and grubbier.

Ha, koogs. i never acquired the taste for series one cos it's very hard to see it as a blackadder, really. But like just about every other bbc boxset ever released, it's probably due a revisit.

ps have i been misreading ding ding ding all this time?

i know that "clang clang clang" went the trolley

"ding ding ding, we have a winner". is from something. something american. google search throws up tons of usages, no etymology that i could see.

if you were only called russell, what a killer routine that could have made

how have you been reading ding^3 dmac?

as a vikingdingding

but maybe some attitudes and foibles are fundamentally unfunny?

i don't think so really - history suggests otherwise.

obviously things become funny/unfunny over time but is comedy shrinking? are there fewer things to make comedy out of now than before as consciousness of and sympathy regarding what may amuse but also offend supposedly broadens?

i think it just changes the tracks, but you'll always have a majority making fun of what you're 'allowed' to make fun of, a smaller set making fun of the people telling them what they're 'allowed' make fun of, a very small minority actually making fun of the things you're not allowed to, and hen it gets a bit meta

As much as I hate Ben Elton, people tediously quoting Blackadder is much more to do with people tediously quoting from anything that they think will make them sound funny and amusing, rather than the sad husk of a person they are. It's hardly the fault of the thing that they're tediously quoting from.

but series 2 onwards seemed to rely on quotable things to be funny, series 1 was a darker, cleverer, less quotable thing (imo, iirc). actually, has been a while since i've seen any of it save the christmas one. all i seem to remember is that 'funniest thing since funny jack mcfunny...' kinda of stuff, which i hated about the latter series.

hard to explain.

Now I'm getting sad, because I'm starting to compare Blackadder (which I love) to The Fast Show (which I hate). I guess that the difference is that Blackadder didn't keep bashing the audience over the head with exactly the same joke except oh "ha ha ha" Arabella Wier is wearing a slightly difference coloured jacket this time.

This thread is making me fear that I will never laugh again.

Welcome to... lexworld!

I guess that the difference is that Blackadder didn't keep bashing the audience over the head with exactly the same joke except oh "ha ha ha" Arabella Wier is wearing a slightly difference coloured jacket this time.

can't compare sitcoms with sketch shows really - many different rules apply

Also the Fast Show was explicitly experimenting with the general laziness of catchphrase comedy; attempting instead of hitting on a catchphrase and milking it, to construct a scenario and a performance where the catchphrase functioned as a joke on first contact.

Different sketches then played with it differently on their repeat appearances - several would take the drone or minimal approach, where the joke would always remain the same and the variations came in the performance or coloration (Jesse, the painter); I'll Get Me Coat merely signaled the genre of each skit, with Williams actually committing a variety of faux pas from sketch to sketch, that could be class-based, malapropism, political...; many of Whitehouse's don't actually use the catchphrase as a punchline at all, instead filling monologues with jokes and letting the catchphrase play as a grace note, and deploying the repetition of the scenario as an opportunity to stealthily build an accretion of character details that allow later sketches - that still may play on the surface as babbling carchphrasesplosions - to be richer and subtler in both performance and writing (eg Rowley Birkin, the Brilliant kid).

(posting bcz phone window full up...)

[GAH FUCK LOST ANOTHER THREE PARAGRAPHS BECAUSE THE CURSOR WENT BELOW THE ZING WINDOW AND I HIT THE RUBBISH BIN ICON TRYING TO GET IT]

PLEASE REWRITE MISSING PARAGRAPHS BECAUSE I WAS REALLY ENJOYING WHAT YOU WERE WRITING ABOUT THE FAST SHOW, WAS REFRESHINGLY NON-REDUCTIVE

en't phones brilliant

I never saw the Brilliant kid pay off (though I only really saw the first two seasons) but another that I did was Ted & Ralph.

I really have no idea why I've only seen the first two seasons.

hated the fast show, someone got me the live arena dvd, watched it bored a year later, the fast show is frequently astonishing

I liked the fast show, I ferquently disliked Little Britain.

That one seemed to be more about the fears or prejudices of the two central people than anything else.

http://www.virginmediapeople.com/electric12/images/jan10_panel_main.jpg

he looks pleased to have won

http://www.coverdude.com/covers/al-green-greatest-hits-1995-inside-cover-80936.jpg

looks rather beside himself there

"ha ha ha I'm just so damn funny ha ha HA HAAAA"

top tip: if you print that john bishop photo out, and then fold it at about one-third and two-thirds of the way along, it actually looks like he's bumming himself

He's gone a bit Neil Diamond on the last one

http://www.thesnipenews.com/thegutter/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/nd.jpg

top tip: if you print that john bishop photo out, and then fold it at about one-third and two-thirds of the way along, it actually looks like he's bumming himself

sorry i take this nonsense back

it's more like one-third and then at eleven-twentieths of the way along

I just wasted a whole hour following those instructions!

http://www.comedycentral.co.uk/videos/the-alternative-comedy-experience-teaser-869890/

In order there: Tony Law, genius but rambly; Josie Long, divisive; Stewart Lee, national treasure; ???, man with 'funny' voice and face; Eleanor Tiernan (?), very good not particularly Alternative; Stephen Carlin, a Glaswegian that I have a lot of time for; Phil Nichol, never funny once, not ever; Simon Munnery, other non-famous survivor of the original Alternative Comedy, having one of his jokes truncated into bizarre seriousness.

Unless I missed it (which is quite possible given that that the trailer is a frantic cross-cutting of barely audible sentence fragments), Munnery doesn't even say anything, just looks thoughtful while Stewart Lee mumbles

I would put Munnery/Lee (Iannucci, Morris, Coogan?) down as their own separate post-Alternative thing, but maybe that's just because I am exactly the right age to have missed the first wave of alternative comedy and not the early 90s set

Did I see a glimpse of that Irish twat with the keyboard? David something, is it?

I didn't see David O'Doherty, but I wouldn't object to seeing him.

You're right, M. spacecadet, but it's a line from one of Munnery's jokes: "I've been described as the closest that Comedy gets to Art. Which means, what, that if I tone down the laughs, stick in some watercolours, I can pass through that line, into the realm of Art that is perilously close to Comedy"

I saw Tony Law just before Christmas, he was pretty good although at this point I have a hard time with anyone doing the hyperactive-skipping-across-the-stage thing, even if it actually works wrt their set