Rolling UK Comedy Thread - "Ricky Don't Lose Larry David's Number

It's good, especially if Bob Mortimer is on. But I avoided it for a while exactly because of the garish set.

i love WILTY especially for bob mortimer and greg davies, but yeah the sets are an abomination

Munya was v good on WILTY last week I thought

Agreed - good chemistry with David.

Just popping in to say "Fuck Alfie Brown"

The Jewish woman who called him out for doing a lazy & insulting "left wing are antisemites" routine in 2023 has been bullied into deleting her account, but you can get an idea of it from him.

To those who’ve asked.

I was doing a work in progress of my new show Red Flags Galore! and made a joke, it’s not in the show, I was off on some tangent.

“I’m what’s often described by some on the left as a ‘centrist’, which means I’m also left wing but I don’t hate Jews”

— 🇺🇦 alfie brown (@abcomedian) March 21, 2023

oh good a comedian who is Very Left Wing, Actually but also hates Corbyn, how refreshing

Never heard of him but amused to find out his dad is Glen Ponder.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9ykKrqZtgQ

2. I didn’t feel comfortable explaining to a Jewish woman that she was wrong on antisemitism, even if I believed that to be the case. I also said, just because she was Jewish didn’t make her necessarily right,

— 🇺🇦 alfie brown (@abcomedian) March 21, 2023

this is A+ weaselling though, apparently he does feel comfortable *telling* a Jewish woman that she's wrong on antisemitism, because that's what he was doing, but he doesn't feel comfortable 'explaining' to her why she's wrong on antisemitism

"I'm too respectful to lecture you on why you're wrong, but if you don't know you're wrong you must be a fucking idiot" - but somehow worse than that.

So happy this person is now on my radar, thanks guys!

sorry, I was going to vent on twitter but had second thoughts and came here instead.

oh fuck I've just realised I've seen this guy live, he was a guest at a podcast record I saw. literally the only live comedy I've seen since about 2001. he was ok there, not hilarious but fine, i liked how he'd named his new baby after alisson becker, then later was wondering about how he took it when becker came out as a bolsonaro fan, now guessing he took it just fine.

Rose Matafeo and Mike Wozniak will host the Junior Taskmaster series: https://t.co/iAtcI2NIHF pic.twitter.com/d0zf3SwTSk

— British Comedy Guide (@BritishComedy) May 16, 2023

Given Taskmaster is my 9yo's favourite programme this is fab news

The Change. was a week late to this but caught the (signed) repeat. it's Bridget Christie and quite a cast of guest stars and episode one went down well.

We zipped through the whole of The Change in one go the other night and enjoyed it a lot.

i like it because it is slow and slightly weird. also, forest of dean.

i lolled several times but couldn't explain to you why

also this week and next bbc2 seems to have a random episode of various comedies on at 10 every night. Lenny Henry yesterday, Ellie and Natasha tonight, Big Train tomorrow. send a bit random but it'll be nice to see some of it again. they could do this on bbc4 like they do totp.

Ellie and Natasha was very enjoyable.

my mistake, it's Ellie and *Natasia*, her from WWDITS and Stath Lets Flats. yes, caught it all last year on bbc iii

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/p0c99012/ellie-natasia

didn't get to the end of Big Train, seemed slow somehow.

Smell Of next week...

the change, eps 5 and 6, groundbreaking in their quiet way.

do you think baddiel and skinner will do “three lions (‘26)”?

Ghosts US series 2 starts tonight on bbc3, 2 a night

Dara's current standup show is also on bbc2 tonight. he's spent the weekend telling people with tickets not to watch it!

still no dedicated taskmaster thread? (that i can find)

taskmaster new zealand is on e4xtra (freeview ch31) nightly at 11ish

A friend of mine is going to be on Taskmaster Portugal :D

A friend of mine did Taskmaster and I was so disappointed that they weren't an absolute comedy gold legend at it. I'm still insanely jealous, like.

aisla is mates with David Baddiel, pass it on

Hahahaha. No.

i think we mentioned it at the time, not realising all the circumstances (serious illness)

Yeah, tbf he was also shit at it because it's not the way his brain works. Some people don't embrace silliness (which is why VCM was also rubbish at it).

i liked the way vcm just spent one task learning to ride a bike

the aforementioned dara show was great in a non-comedy kind of way. i mean it was funny in parts but the big story took it further

Yeah, Dara's show was really good. My mum is not really one for a standup show, but I felt the big story would resonate with her, and she really enjoyed it.

Last week I went to see Rhod Gilbert doing a work in progress show about his cancer journey, and it was similarly great.

(This is a man not afraid to embrace silliness and thus one of my favourite Taskmaster contestants ever)

I think I've said it before but Taskmaster NZ S2 is the best series of the whole franchise, even moreso than Bob Mortimer and Sally Phillips.

S3 has a few tasks where it genuinely looks like the person taking part has had some kind of breakdown.

S4 is being broadcast at the moment and has Karen O'Leary on it so I have high hopes.

enjoying taskmaster NZ (all new tasks, which helps) but i went to wikipedia to see who these people were and the winner was right there, highlighted in pink but, tbh, 4 episodes in and i'm having trouble believing it

Ha! Exactly the same thing happened to me last night.

I've watched clips of some of the Taskmaster remakes on youtube, tbh I think I prefer the ones that are not in English and you have to infer what's going on and what each contestant's schtick is - ok so this guy must be like the Norwegian Johnny Vegas, that kind of thing

S4 is very much a slow burner, there's one contestant who is very funny being himself, but not so much so when he tries to be.

KO'L very disappointing, apparently she is a lesbian and has a wife although you'd never know and she never mentions it. And she only uses it as part of her solution for one or two tasks an episode.

Anyway 6 episodes broadcast and it's the tightest series ever, I think there are 7 points separating the contestants. (This may be because nobody is consistently good - one of the prize tasks saw a maximum score of 2).

Can't find a source for TM Australia yet.

We watched the first episode of the NZ one and it was good in a different way. Obviously much of the joy of UK one is "here's people you know doing stupid things", which is missing here. And I love the fact that right out of the gate two of the people on it are related, because of course.
Did all these just happen in the last year or so? I wonder why we don't have one in Ireland yet.

11pm on e4extra (not 4, not more4, not even e4 but e4extra) seems like a bit of a waste for these, although there is more sexual content than usual if s1 is anything to go by

my epg search has turned up TM Sweden on all4 (series 2, all 8 episodes) and 30 (thirty) episodes (series 1, 2, 3) of TM NZ

i think the NZ one might've had a gap between tasks and the live show - there are references to covid but they don't seem to be distancing in the vt

That would explain the repeated references to the tasks being recorded a long time ago.

I watched the first half hour of the Dara O'Brien thing and it didn't raise a single smirk so I turned it off. Sorry.

loved the TM NZ S01E08 costume task

Watched Jamie Demetriou's Netflix special 'A Whole Lifetime' the other day. I like this guy, especially the Jarressey short, and Stah Lets Flats. But this didn't quite cut it.

Some occasional laffs, but too many Bo Burnham-esque musical pieces in which the joke hinges on the song and singing being deliberately bad. There's even a very tiresome song-and-dance social commmentary piece at the end about the mundane things people write on Facebook etc.

But I didn't come here to talk about that show. I came here to talk about toilet humour.

Maybe it's me getting old and boring, but I've noticed a lot of UK comedy lately seems to fall back on cheap and childish scatological laughs.

At the start of 'A Whole Lifetime', a schoolboy chucks a bucket of water at Demetriou's arse to "make it look like you've taken a really wet shit".
Later a man on a stag-do soils himself in a pub in an over-enthusiastic display of machismo.

It's not that there isn't a time and place for the odd well-executed gross-out joke, but when it's the punchline that the sketch has been leading towards, it feels like a cop out; like the writers couldn't think of a way to end it so they just fall-back on someone shitting themselves.

For nostalgia's sake I listened to a bit of the recent(ish) Fonejacker podcast, an audible reboot of the 2009 show. I wasn't expecting great things to be honest - I liked the show back in the day, but couldn't imagine it working too well now. It turned out to be fine really, other than parts where, again, the calls just devolve into the prankster talking about 'tits and arses' etc until the victim hangs up. There's no real joke there - it's just schoolboy stuff.

Even Philomena Cunk, whose (much as I like her) schtick might be wearing a bit thin now - I saw a clip of her asking a historian about Greek audiences being able to see "right up wrestlers' bumholes" apropos of them being naked. Later "If Victorians saw a penis they'd probably have a stroke".

It's not totally unfunny. Maybe I've become a total prig in my middle age. But I just think it's a bit lazy, a bit "hurr hurr poo and wee", especially for comedians I think of as being a bit above all that.

Is this even a new thing? Are we so keen to carry on Carrying On? At least those old films worked with double-entendres, cleverly weaving the smutty stuff into the jokes. These recent examples just feel like toilet humour for toilet humour's sake.

"Adult" humour. I remember, years ago, seeing Stanley Baxter being interviewed about alternative comedy and saying it seemed kind of immature to him.

I think of the late 90's/early 00's as the period when scatological humour was most popular, tho the examples I can think of are US (South Park, Farrely Bros)...I guess Inbetweeners was a UK manifestation of this? Anyway don't think it's prevalent currently at all.

Ayoade being quoted on the cover of this is depressing as fuck. pic.twitter.com/srByG0xorA

— JC (@Jonnyishh) September 13, 2023

Oof.