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

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