Who is the best TV stand-up comedian? In the immortal words of Harry Hill: “There’s only one way to decide it – FIGHT!” But as that option isn’t available, TV critic Gary Bushell has named who he believes are the 10 best comedians of all time.
Bushell, who has been a journalist and critic for 40 years for several national publishers, says his list is a “considered top ten of stand-up comedians who also make or made TV shows”. He adds that the list is “confined to solo turns (so no Morecambe & Wise) and doesn’t include comedy magicians like the immortal Tommy Cooper or the squeakier Joe Pasquale”.
Writing his list for The Express, he invites readers to “feel free to disagree at the end”. Which, judging by some of the names on this list, is probably likely.
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10. Jasper Carrott
Like Billy Connolly, Mike Harding and Richard Digance, Birmingham-born Carrott started performing in folk clubs writing observational jokes -Credit:SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Birmingham-born Carrott started performing in folk clubs, writing observational jokes to stand out from turns who recycled other people’s gags before blossoming into stand-up and becoming a TV regular. He hasn’t been on screen for a while, he says, “for a very good reason: I can’t dance, I can’t skate and I’m a crap cook”.
Gary says: “The Beeb’s belated tribute to Jasper, 80, was tucked away on BBC4. A shame. The evening over-flowed with comic joy as Carrott noted ‘a cougar for me would be 98 with an insatiable lust for bingo… Where would you go after a date? Back to her place, the care home!'”
Noting that Robin Williams was a fan, Gary says Jasper “has always had a nice line in smart, relatable stand-up. His TV show Jasper Carrott: Back To The Front found him reflecting on teenage boys: ‘Surly, rude, uncommunicative, spotty… and what do we do? We make them into shop assistants’.”
After his accidental hit single in 1975 (Funky Moped b/w Magic Roundabout), he became a TV fixture for decades hosting shows like Carrott’s Lib and Canned Carrott, and starring in The Detectives (co-written by Steve ‘Peaky Blinders’ Knight), a deadpan spoof of crime detective dramas.
Jasper’s best gags included: “Laughter is the best medicine — unless you’re diabetic, then insulin comes pretty high on the list.”
9. Lee Mack
Lancashire’s Lee Mack, born Lee Gordon McKillop, is best known now as a team captain on BBC1’s Would I Lie To You? -Credit:Getty Images
Lancashire’s Lee Mack, born Lee Gordon McKillop, is best known now as a team captain on BBC1’s Would I Lie To You? His lightning-fast quips, tall tales, and laser-sharp mind have made this inspired resurrection of Call My Bluff an unmissable treat and also one of the few successful comedy shows in today’s schedules.
A former Pontins Bluecoat Lee, 57, won the So You Think You’re Funny award at the 1995 Edinburgh Fringe and was nominated for the Perrier Award five years later. In 2006 he created, co-wrote and starred in the hit sitcom Not Going Out which still runs to this day. Although lacking the emotional depth of classics like Porridge and Steptoe & Son, the show remains a guaranteed gag-fest with rapid one-liners like “I’m going to donate my body to science, keep my dad happy – he always wanted me to go to medical school.”
The writers spend 10 months “locked away, getting the stories right” says Lee who has always sought to emulate the US sitcom model: “Friends, Seinfeld, Frasier – every ten seconds there’s a gag.”
On stage Lee is just as funny, cracking jokes like “I’m in a relationship at the moment. Sorry girls…it’s going to have to be your place.”
“We had a bite to eat around the corner. Horse and Hounds – I won’t be ordering that again.”
And “My wife, she’s carrying our first child. He’s eight, the lazy little…” All this and a Buddhist podcast too.
8. Harry Hill
Harry Hill, the “wide-collared loon” whose live blend of surreal absurdity and sharp one-liners translated into hours of TV hilarity -Credit:Getty Images
“The ‘wide-collared loon’, whose live blend of surreal absurdity and sharp one-liners translated into hours of TV hilarity,” says Gary.
“Best was his long-running Harry Hill’s TV Burp, essentially Googlebox with giggles. Kent-raised former doctor Harry (born Mathew Hall) turned the show into a comedy masterclass combining clips with catchphrases, puppets, song snippets, stunts, double takes, physical comedy, off-the-wall gags, unexpected guests and wry observations. Noticing Paul Burrell’s biceps on I’m A Celebrity, Harry quipped; ‘Where’d he get those muscles?…It’s from carting [Princess Diana’s] stuff up into the loft!'”
Hill’s goonish catchphrases included ‘stalagmites, stalactites – you’ve got to have a system’. Stars and bit-part actors from shows Harry was reviewing would turn up in the studio along with the badger parade, The K Factor (Hill’s knitting-based answer to The X Factor), and frequent fights.
“Who is the naughtiest vegetarian?” he asked before calling on a clash between Heather Mills and Hitler.
“Harry and his writers would sit through hours of TV just for a single joke, so unsurprisingly he finally pulled the plugs after eleven series (121 shows),” notes Gary.
“His next ITV show Alien Fun Capsule, continued the TV Burp humour in the form of a panel show with baffled and bemused celebrity panellists. Lorraine Kelly was asked to blow into a bagpipe breathalyser after been shown a clip of her younger self apparently inebriated.”
Harry’s stand-up was equally bonkers: “My Dad used to say ‘always fight fire with fire’, which is probably why he got thrown out of the fire brigade.”
7. Peter Kay
The legendary Peter Kay -Credit:Getty Images
“Everything this cuddly comedy nice guy has ever done on TV has been quality,” writes Gary. “From Peter Kay’s Phoenix Nights to the dialogue he wrote for his 2004 Coronation Street character Eric Gartside, a Newton & Ridley drayman who dated Shelley Unwin.”
From a working-class Irish family, Kay was born and bred in Bolton and his warm, earthy comedy has stayed true to his roots. His 2010–2011 stand-up comedy sold over 1.2million tickets. His early stand-up shows have been repeated on TV so many times most viewers could repeat every punchline: “I saw a fat person wearing a sweatshirt with ‘Guess’ on it. I said: ‘Thyroid problem?'”
Gary says: “Much of his humour is recognisable and drawn from real life including this true story about an elderly neighbour: ‘There was a power cut one night, so my mum went round to see if she was all right. She said ‘I thought there’d been a power cut – then a bus went past with its lights on’.”
His 2004 TV adverts for John Smith’s bitter, played on his everyman appeal with catchphrases, “’Ave it!” and “Two lamb bhunas.” Kay even notched up three No 1 hit singles including Is This The Way To Amarillo with Tony Christie. His acting credits range from Doctor Who – where his sinister character, Victor Kennedy, turned out to be a hostile alien called the Abzorbaloff – to playing Danny Baker’s Cockney docker father Fred in the much-missed Cradle To Grave. Peter’s last series was the gentler comedy Peter Kay’s Car Share (2015 – 2018).
Gary says: “Peter’s humour brought traditional northern comedy up to date without losing its mass appeal. He might be standing on the shoulders of giants, but in the process he turned himself into a 21st century Goliath.”
6. Jim Davidson
Jim Davidson -Credit:AFP/Getty Images
“He has been cancelled, arrested (and acquitted), insulted and branded a ‘racist, sexist, right-wing dinosaur’,” writes Gary.
“Jim Davidson’s career has seen more twists and turns than a fairground Waltzer but in the process his TV career produced a success of gems.”
Gary notes how growing up on a southeast London council estate in Kidbrooke, Jim was impressed by Dave Allen and inspired by near-the-knuckle blue-collar stand-up comedians like Jimmy “Kinnel” Jones and Peter Demmer. The youngest son of a Glaswegian father and an Irish mother from Cork, Jim’s gift for mimicry took off at St Austin’s boys’ school in southeast London impersonating teachers.
He was 22 when he won his heat on ITV talent show New Faces in 1976, turning it into this joke: “I rang home and said, ‘Mum, I’ve won New Faces, you’ll never have to work again’. And she didn’t, the lazy cow’.”
Gary says: “Jim came second in the final and his subsequent TV career encompassed sketch shows, sitcoms, stand-up (Stand Up Jim Davidson), and a stint as the fiendish Phantom Flan-Flinger on brilliant Saturday morning kids’ show Tiswas. BBC1 poached him to host snooker game-show Big Break for ten hit series.
“He then took over The Generation Game for six years, turning it into an anarchic cross between the original show and Tiswas, cramming funny putty into every possible crevice. The breadth of Jim’s comedic prowess, encompassing gag-telling, physical comedy, impressions, anecdotes, and songs, is generally overlooked by his detractors. In his varied career, he has also been an actor, playwright, panto star and businessman. He launched his own comedy streaming channel Ustreme during lockdown.”
5. Les Dawson
Snooty critics wrongly dismissed him as a purveyor of cheap ‘misogynist’ mother-in-law jokes, says Gary -Credit:-
Gary says: “Snooty critics wrongly dismissed him as a purveyor of cheap ‘misogynist’ mother-in-law jokes, but Les, the Manchester-born son of a brick-layer, was a unique and complex comedian.
“He was happiest performing fanciful self-penned comic monologues. He was, one writer observed, ‘a big fat, heavy slob of a man but with a very sensitive mind’.
“Dawson’s routines flowed from a northern life that was already fading into memories – a world of clogs and shawls, pubs and social clubs.”
After Les won Opportunity Knocks in 1967, the BBC gave him his long-running series Sez Les. He was a regular on the comedy panel show Jokers Wild. He did one-liners like: “Ours is a football marriage, we keep waiting for the other one to kick off”, “I used to sell furniture for a living…the trouble was, it was my own” and “He drank so heavily, the only thing that grew on his grave were hops”. He also had a strong line in longer, more literate jokes such as: “In awe, I watched the waxing moon ride across the zenith of the heavens like an ambered chariot towards the ebony void of infinite space wherein the tethered belts of Jupiter and Mars hang, for ever festooned in their orbital majesty. And as I looked at all this, I thought… I must put a roof on this toilet.”
Gary adds: “Millions warmed to his grim-faced, gravel-voiced, glumly misanthropic persona. At his best Les channelled his hero, WC Fields (just as Jack Dee later channelled Dawson). Yes, he did mother-in-law jokes, but they evolved out of the real problems caused by young hard-up postwar couple being forced to live with in-laws. Dawson took over as presenter of BBC quiz show Blankety Blank from 1984 to 1990, turning it a vehicle for his po-faced put-downs.
“He is remembered now for his gurning face, his garden fence Cissie and Ada double act with Roy Barraclough. But beyond the broad comedy, Dawson appeared in Alan Plater’s The Loner, and played the centenarian Nona in an Argentinian play of that name on BBC2. He also wrote 12 books included a funny Raymond Chandler spoof called Well Fared, My Lovely. The glum clown could play Hamlet when he needed to.”
4. Paul O’Grady
Paul O’Grady was onstage as Lily at London’s Vauxhall Tavern in 1987 when the pub was raided by the drug squad -Credit:Getty Images
Gary beings his praise of O’Grady by remebering this story: “Paul O’Grady was onstage as Lily at London’s Vauxhall Tavern in 1987 when the pub was raided by the drug squad. Noticing the officers were all wearing rubber gloves, in the age of Aids paranoia, Lily quipped, ‘Looks like we’ve got some help with the washing up’.”
He adds: “Nothing phased him. O’Grady based his ‘blonde bombsite’ creation on the tough, colourful women of his own Birkenhead family and their neighbours. Savage was Paul’s mother’s maiden name and acid tongues abounded. He recalled ‘The aunties would turn up at a wedding dressed to death, and there’d often be a fight. One cousin’s marriage ended up in the Birkenhead News with the headline Fracas at Wedding’.
“O’Grady’s father was a plant operator at an oil refinery, his mum worked in a factory and he’d had a strict Catholic upbringing. Unlike previous TV drag acts like Danny La Rue and Dame Edna, ‘Lily Veronica Mae Savage’ was a working-class peroxide ‘slapper’ who wore laddered tights and PVC mini-skirts and let her dark roots show. His comedy hit hard but as he said ‘Noel Coward said work is more fun than fun, but then he didn’t work in the Bird’s Eye factory packing frozen fish fingers nine hours a day, did he?'”
Lily’s first proper TV airing was Channel 4’s late-night Viva Cabaret! Small TV appearances followed, including a cameo in Brookside, before the character was signed up by The Big Breakfast to do celebrity interviews. Lily had her own ITV An Evening With and by 1998 had taken over BBC1’s Blankety Blank. Some of her printable lines include: “I went to the doctor the other day and he said I was a paranoid schizophrenic… Well, he didn’t actually say it, but we know what he was thinking.”
Gary adds: “Lily never lost her razor-sharp tongue or her subversive edge, but Paul tired of her and by 2001 he was presenting travelogues for ITV out of costume before starring in BBC sitcom Eyes Down (2003-04) and then presenting ITV’s daytime chat show The Paul O’Grady Show which was rebranded as The New Paul O’Grady Show on C4.”
3. Bob Monkhouse
Bob Monkhouse was a successful TV game show host for decades -Credit:TV Times/Future Publishing via Getty Images
“He was such a successful TV game show host for decades people forgot Monkhouse was a brilliant stand-up comedian,” says Gary.
“The reminders came in the shape of his ITV An Audience With and borderline blue best-selling DVD Bob Monkhouse Exposes Himself. Kent-born Bob had a photographic memory and instant recall of one-liners. He was also self-aware, smart and a superb gag writer, as demonstrated by this self-effacing one-liner: ‘They laughed when I said I was going to be a comedian…they’re not laughing now.’
“Other Bob gems included ‘I’d never be unfaithful to my wife – I love my house too much’. And ‘I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my father. Not screaming and crying like his passengers’. His writing was inventive and he was a superb raconteur. Yet he pulled no punches about his own life in his honest and unsparing 1994 autobiography, Crying With Laughter.”
Robert Alan Monkhouse was the grandson of a custard powder tycoon. A lonely, overweight child, Bob felt unloved by his parents and cheered himself up by writing jokes which he sold to children’s comics and later comedians like the immortal Max Miller.
In 1948 he conned his way to a BBC radio audition. Shortly afterwards, he and Terry Scott were the BBC’s first contracted comedians. Bob and his writing partner Denis Goodwin wrote up to seven radio scripts a week, as well as material for Bob Hope and Dean Martin. On black and white TV Bob hosted Candid Camera, Mad Movies and more; he also appeared in the first Carry On film. In 67 ITV poached him to compere Sunday Night at the London Palladium. His success led to his first game show host, The Golden Shot, followed by Family Fortunes, Celebrity Squares, Bob’s Full House, Bob’s Your Uncle and a revival of Opportunity Knocks. Yet he never stopped live work: “I still enjoy sex at 74,” he said. “I live at 75, it’s no distance.”
Before Bob’s death in December 2003, he performed in front of an audience of younger comedians including Mark Steel and Fiona Allen. The show called Bob Monkhouse: The Last Stand proved he was still relevant and crucially still funny.
2. Bernard Manning
Bernard Manning -Credit:Channel 5
Gary says: “Mr Controversy. The combative bad boy who rose from the northern working men’s club circuit to the simultaneous status of folk demon and national treasure. And the man of whom Stephen Fry said ‘Few comedians I’ve ever seen have been able to make the art look so simple’.
“Liberal myths about Manning begin with the idea that he was outrageously right-wing and built a career on ethnic jokes. Neither claim is true. Bernard Manning once spoke to me with affection about Labour PM Harold Wilson; he also loved Nye Bevan for his oratory, but Churchill was his great political hero.
“And as for jokes, just watch his TV debut on ITV’s The Comedians. The best included two attendants on a boating lake: One shouts, ‘Come in number 91, your time is up’. The other said ‘We’ve only got 90 boats’. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Are you having trouble number 16?’
“His gags on The Wheeltappers & Shunters’ Social Club are also as clean as freshly fallen true. Yes, Bernard’s act got bluer and dodgier as time progressed but busting through the boundaries of good taste meant money in the bank for the greengrocer’s son: ‘Grown men that work on building sites don’t want to hear ‘ecky thump’ and ‘ooh dammit’, he said.
“18-stone Manning had the timing of a Swiss watch and his ‘world famous’ Embassy Club in Harpurhey, north Manchester, was always packed. Older people were asked ‘Is it cold in the ground this morning?’ and suspected feminists were told they needed ‘a good shag’. Yet his fans ranged from Madonna to historian AJP Taylor. Off-camera he got on with people of all colours and creeds. Bernard grew up poor, saying: ‘We used to sleep five to a bed, and three of them used to wet the bed. I learnt to swim before I could walk’.
“His first appearance on BBC1’s live Wogan chat show viewers jammed the switchboard complaining about his swearing and near-the-knuckle jokes. He later clashed with Esther Rantzen and Joan Rivers on TV, winning both bouts. Only Mrs Merton outsmarted him. In 1992, Jonathan Ross invited him on his C4 show for a spoof sketch – Bernard Manning Sings The Smiths. TV hated him but couldn’t stop filming him. Even World In Action couldn’t sink him with their secret film of a 1995 a police charity dinner. In 2005 he was invited on Celebrity Big Brother but turned him down saying he was never rude to people he met.”
1. Billy Connolly
Billy Connolly, this former welder from the Glasgow shipyards, is the funniest man alive -Credit:Getty Images
“No explanation required,” says Gary. “But if you need one, this former welder from the Glasgow shipyards is the funniest man alive. A masterful storyteller, the Big Yin started in the folk clubs in the Humblebums with Gerry Rafferty.
“‘I used to be a folk singer but I was dreadful’, he once said. ‘I had a voice like a goose farting in the fog’. Yet young Billy – now Sir William Connolly – also had a razor-sharp mind. Comedy flowed out of him like sweat from Lee Evans. His humour was observational, his stories, based in reality, were engaging, and his language was unfiltered. Connolly made comedy seem effortless.
“Often he was the target: ‘I always look skint. When I buy a Big Issue, people take it out of my hand and give me a pound’,” he said. Along with: ‘Whenever I wear something expensive it looks stolen’.
“He even made his Parkinson’s diagnosis funny: ‘I’ve got Parkinson’s disease – I wish he’d f***ing kept it’. He appeared on Michael Parkinson’s TV chat-show fifteen times, starting in 1975 the same year Billy topped the charts with his spoof version of Tammy Wynette’s D.I.V.O.R.C.E. America loved him too. He advised Scottish-Americans how to identify tartans: ‘It’s easy – you simply look under the kilt, and if it’s a quarter-pounder, you know it’s a McDonald’s’.
“Connolly’s long and varied career has encompassed everything from a rib-tickling An Audience With to serious film roles via TV travelogues. But stand-up comedy was his forte. Billy has given it up now, and retired to the Florida Keys, but 2022’s Billy Connolly Does series reminded us he’s still hilarious. The show mixed old clips with new anecdotes, all sautéed in mischief and joy.
“Clips of Billy’s drunk walking routine were still hilarious. Now teetotal, Connolly admitted alcohol doesn’t make you clever: ‘I found that out when I was in a phone box in London and I couldn’t get out’.
“We got confessions – punching hecklers, punching paparazzi – vintage footage, and homespun wisdom. Billy was always fearless, original and near-the-knuckle. All reasons why he’d be cancelled in this strange age where humourless berks censor our greatest comedies and slap warnings on Dad’s Army. Laughter can’t be regulated. As Billy says, ‘life can be funny, if you give it half a chance’.”