Behind the laughter lies a secret: TV comedians often rely on clever editing to appear funnier. Uncover the truth about your favorite comedy shows.
Britain’s worst comedians in Britain have been named by Express review editor Garry Bushell.
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Have you ever watched a stand-up comedian on TV and wondered what their audience is laughing at? When I was a judge on ITV’s The Big Big Talent Show, the producer insisted on having weak, under-developed club comedians on almost every week. They inevitably came bottom in the studio audience vote but on TV, by the cynical use of “borrowed” laughter and audience cut-aways, it looked like the comics were storming it.
That’s exactly what happens on BBC2’s Live At The Apollo too. You sit in the Eventim Apollo audience watching the latest obscure booking die, and wonder at their on-screen resurrection months later. For decades, we have suffered TV comedians who hector us or lecture us or just die on their backsides and yet keep on getting repeatedly booked for shows. Here is my personal Top Eleven of TV’s Most Useless Comedians. It’s a mark of how low television comedy has sunk that Jo ‘Three Jokes’ Brand is not even on the list.
11 Nish Kumar
Remember when Kumar was booed off-stage at a charity benefit show? As a fellow Hendrix fan, I felt for him, but the ticket-paying audience didn’t take kindly to his bombardment of lacklustre “jokes” about Brexit, Boris and so on. Nish’s big problem, apart from being as funny as a ruptured hernia, is that he only works when the audience are as far-Left as he is.
One of his early jokes at that infamous 2019 Lord Taverners event was to say the wartime spirit can’t get us through Brexit challenges as modern folk can barely cope with their iPhone battery running down to 8 per cent. A line that isn’t remotely funny. But then neither was shouting “White people” at young, liberally-inclined viewers of BBC2’s The Mash Report.
A better comedian, like Mark Steel, can handle an audience who disagree with their politics, and even win some over. Nish is always too concerned with promoting and defending his political agenda.
Watch his Live At The Apollo clip. He ends his routine with a joke-free rant about the failures of housing policy, which is received with rapturous applause. This is known as “clapter comedy”, people don’t laugh, they clap in agreement. In a bubble of leftwing consensus, Nish kills it.
He finished by telling the audience, “I’m very clever”. Maybe he is. But having a history degree from Durham doesn’t make you hilarious. Kumar claimed on stage that Britain was in the grip of “post-fact politics”. Sadly for us, the BBC, in common with other channels, is in the grip of “post-laughter” comedy.
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10 Sue Perkins
America TV gave us Joan Rivers, Rita Rudner, and Whitney Cummings. Apparently, the best British television can do is Sue Perkins. South Londoner Sue, 55, has been a TV fixture for nearly 30 years. In that time, she has notched up a flop sitcom (Heading Out), a flop Saturday night game show (Don’t Scare The Hare), and doomed breakfast show (RI:SE). Her nadir was a diabolical shot a co-hosting a chronic Generation Game revival.
Yet not one of these disastrous commissions, mostly paid for by the licence fee, has put a stop to her TV career. It’s almost as if starting out at the Cambridge Footlights guarantees you a job for life.
In December, Sue unveils her latest stand-up show The Eternal Shame Of Sue Perkins, which apparently delivers “a hilarious treatise on stigma, humiliation, and misunderstanding”. I wonder if she will include any of “best lines” from Taskmaster (largely different variations of “You’re just a s***!”) or her hilarious Great British Bake Off catchphrase – “Bake!”
(Image: Ken McKay/ITV/Shutterstock)
9 Paddy McGuinness
Lancashire’s own Patrick McGuinness rose to fame on his pal Peter Kay’s back and built a career on chutzpah, easy targets and borrowed gags, injecting his early stand-up shows with Kay-style nostalgia and live recreations of his cheesy Take Me Out ITV dating show – just like the Club 18-30 rep he once was.
His comic material tackled stag-dos, hen-dos, lap-dancers, and strip clubs. He would pick a woman out of the audience to sing to and flirt with, quipping, “you’ll soon be going down…to the dressing room.” It is laddish banter writ large, popular with people on drunken nights out who like shouting “Oggy-oggy-oggy”. And why not? Good luck to him and to them.
But I’m not entirely sure it qualifies him to self-identify as a comedian. Or to ruin Question Of Sport. It’s not exactly Dave Allen. Paddy, 52, is an over-promoted holiday rep. Confidence alone has allowed him to enjoy a lengthy career TV presenter. Better turns are available.
(Image: Ken McKay/ITV/Shutterstock)
8 James Acaster
Former drummer James died a comedy death when he was booked, bizarrely, to appear on ITV variety show, Live At The Palladium. The studio audience didn’t take kindly to his five-minute routine about orange juice. Nor did viewers or the TV crew.
One of them told me, “he sucked the air out of the room and the will to live out of the audience”. Kettering-born James, 40, described the night as career suicide. Yet it didn’t stop him returning to the 2017 disaster in his 2018 Netflix special Repertoire where he deconstructed his “orange juice bit”. The following year, James ruined his own touring show, Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999, by telling the Harrogate audience – “This is an awful gig, why have I bothered coming here? Why have you bothered showing up? I don’t get why you’re here.”
He later admitted, “I just drove it into the ground from minute one.” Which proves that honesty is not always the best policy. There is an audience for awkward comedians like James, and largely they are stoned or sloshed and watching Channel 4 late on a Friday night over Uber Eats pizzas. But his style doesn’t work for mainstream audiences who are badly served by broadcasters.
7. Miranda Hart
Big woman falls over. Enough said.
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6 Alan Carr
The voice is the first problem. It sounds like he’s talking with two plums in his mouth. When Weymouth-born Carr first arrived on mainstream TV, via Des & Mel, he was likeably camp with old-school appeal. He was then presumably advised to get progressively bluer to the delight of TV commissioners and has never been off our screens since.
And that’s despite ruining some of our most beloved TV quiz shows. Most tragically of all, Bullseye. Oddly Alan’s game show remake series was itself a remake of Ant & Dec’s Game Show Marathon remake of old game shows – which ITV axed. If they couldn’t make it a hit, how could Alan with his all his braying and gurning? Disastrous Carr-crash formats reached rock bottom with the nonsensical Alan Carr’s Picture Slam. Every time he said the catchphrase “In with a shout?” I was out for a pint.
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5 Phill Jupitus
Anyone who watched his Quadrophobia stand-up show would have concluded that Jupitus was as funny as a puncture on a scooter run. So why be surprised that his regular TV appearances were irritatingly grim? On QI, he specialised in taking a subject and running it into the ground through repetition, exaggeration, and manufactured rage.
The bit ignited maybe one in ten times, but on most occasions, it was simply tedious. Even when the rant wasn’t remotely amusing, he wouldn’t let it go, banging on like some simple-minded, privately-educated donkey. (See also his fall-back habit of mangling the English language by breaking into cod Shakespearean lingo, forsooth and hey nonny nonny.)
Born Chris Swan, on the Isle Of Wight, Phill, 63, started out in the 80s as the unremarkable Porky the Poet, best remembered as a regular support act for Billy Bragg. Jupitus has retired now but he is still showing in repeats of QI – the 2009 French episode is particularly grim. Even the other panellists look fed up with him. Make it stop.
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4 John Bishop
The professional Scouser from Runcorn started out as a pharmaceutical salesman before flogging a different kind of sedative as a stand-up comedian. His energy and confidence served him well. John, 58, has been in everything from Live At The Apollo to Doctor Who. He had his own ITV comedy chat show, The John Bishop Show, that lasted for 13 episodes, and did panto with Sir Ian McKellen.
Bishop began his stand-up career by chance. He went to The Frog and Bucket comedy club in Manchester 25 years ago to find someone to make him laugh and ended up by jumping on stage and doing it himself – unplanned, unscripted, and powered by personality alone. Bishop won over commissioners and audiences with his everyman persona and chatty style. But his comedy still feels insubstantial. Most of his anecdotes are unfocused and lack elemental things like punchlines. (And as we know from ITV’s ill-fated The Nightly Show, topical comedy is not his field.)
This is the gist: John has done something or gone somewhere and tells you all about it in great detail, with much deviation and many repetitions. You might be engaged for the journey but what is the destination? Even a raconteur needs a big finish. Otherwise, it’s just a cocky bloke telling you about his underwhelming day. To make it worse, John’s “Scouse” accent is more mangled than Cilla Black’s. It’s so bad that once on the Graham Norton Show an actress guest asked him “Could you do an English accent?” It was the highlight of his TV career.
(Image: Dave Benett/Getty Images for Just Eat)
3 Adam Hills
Satire is supposed to be savagely unbiased. Hills, 55, makes a mockery of that premise by blowing smoke up the posterior of his leftwing heroes. The Aussie-born “honorary Brit” has been hosting Channel 4’s The Last Leg for 13 years and nobody is more certain of his brilliance or amused by his jokes than he is.
The problem is, like most American TV late night show hosts, fearless Hills only targets right-wing politicians. Boris, Farage, Trump… they are the enemy; Labour get an easy ride (just like on Have I Got News For You). On last year’s The Last Leg: Election Special, for example, Hills waxed lyrical about new prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, claiming he had given voters “a promise of hope”. That lasted well…
Before Starmer, Hills gave the star treatment to Jeremy Corbyn on an 2016 show. Corbyn turned up in a dinner jacket and a fake fur coat in a white Bentley with a number plate reading “Cor blimey”, and was allowed to chat unchallenged about his policies on nuclear weapons, the NHS and human rights. It took their other guest Russell Crowe to ask Jezza a mildly difficult question.
You can’t paint yourself as a satirist and not criticise whichever party is in power. Your job is to be acidly sceptical of all politicians, not to be a fawning fan-boy for Two-Tier Keir and his calamitous out-of-touch comrades.
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2 Rosie Jones
The most important thing about stand-up comedy is timing, so for someone with cerebral palsy to become a professional comedienne is an incredible achievement. My objections to Bridlington-born Jones aren’t to her delivery but her material.
Her whole act revolves around being a lesbian, swearing, and jokes about “fingering”. It’s crude and childish. Hopeless stuff. Watching her on comedy panel shows is like wading through treacle. This isn’t “ableist abuse”, it’s comical truth. Rosie, 35, admits, “Nobody finds me as funny as I find myself.” Enough said.
1 David Walliams
Hugely successful yes, but insufferably vain and over-rated. Walliams, 54, found fame on the BBC’s ultra-repetitive Little Britain sketch show, but was also responsible for the show’s most misogynist element – the old lady who wets herself. That was the joke. His character, Mrs Emery, is an incontinent woman who can’t control her bladder and, ahem, lets flow in public places. Laugh? You’ll never start.
Surrey-raised Walliams was rocketed to another level of fame as a judge on ITV’s Britain’s Got Talent. This was wrong on two levels. Firstly, he has zero critical faculties and would champion any untalented act if they were in the least bit camp. Secondly, because of the creepy “comedy” he brought to the show. For series after series, he pretended to fancy Simon Cowell in inappropriate, cringe-worthy ways.
As a point of order, ITV cancelled the much funnier Duncan Novelle in the mid-80s for being a straight comedian inhabiting a gay comedy character. Double standards? The nasty edge to Walliams’ comedy was reflected in the real-life scandal where he was recorded making derogatory and sexually explicit remarks about BGT contestants during the recording of an episode of the ITV show. He referred to one contestant, a pensioner, as a c-word and said of another, “She’s like the slightly boring girl you meet in the pub that thinks you want to f*** them, but you don’t.” What a gent. His scatological children’s books are dismal too.
PS. I apologise for not including Stephen K Amos, whose material is limper than an octogenarian vicar’s handshake, smug shouty Griff Rhys Jones tribute act Andy Parsons, and wonky-eyed PC berk Russell Howard; women want to mother him, I would add an ‘s’.
