10. Natalie Palamides (Pleasance, Edinburgh)
Oddball of the year prize goes to this US import from a disciple of the cult clown Dr Brown, who directed Laid, Palamides’ ritualistic comic-theatre nugget about a woman’s neurotic relationship with her eggs. Dotty bordering on psychotic and wickedly playful, Palamides’ debut combined silliness with a suggestive parable about fertility, the cycle of life and the anxiety attendant on having and rearing children.
9. Jon Pointing (Pleasance, Edinburgh)
Cayden Hunter, Pointing’s preening acting-coach alter ego, is a man of monstrous ego and minuscule self-knowledge. To anyone who’s ever attended a drama workshop, Pointing’s honey-voiced takedown of trust exercises and “truth” worship – showcased in debut show Act Natural – will ring a deafening bell. But there’s nothing niche about the main joke here, which is that Hunter is an incorrigible douchebag of David Brentian proportions.
8. Desiree Burch (Bob’s Blundabus, Edinburgh)
I saw Desiree Burch’s two most recent standup shows this year, and they signalled clearly that this was a voice worth listening to: fearlessly self-interrogative, great fun, and less likely to stand on ceremony than stamp on it. The material ranged across race, sex and body image. Her Edinburgh fringe show, Unf*ckable, traced her professional experiences as a “virgin dominatrix” in her native Manhattan: subject matter she makes troubling and uproarious in equal measure.
7. Tim Key (Soho theatre, London)
The hipsters’ favourite and Alan Partridge wing-man returned this year with Megadate, splicing a story of a heartsick traipse across London to recover a lost love with offbeat poems, arty film and autobiographical standup. Whether Key is being tender or ironic, self-delighted or abject is forever uncertain as he navigates the territory of singledom, career stasis and midlife disappointment. It’s sly and more narratively satisfying than anything he’s done, and full of jokes that couldn’t be anyone else’s.
6. Rose Matafeo (Pleasance, Edinburgh)
Fulfilling the promise of her maiden show Finally Dead in 2016, Kiwi tyro Rose Matafeo returned this year with a follow-up, Sassy Best Friend, about the personalities available to young women today. Her stage persona is what you get when a bundle of neurotic energy collides with a barrel of fun; her show dissected romcoms, slogan T-shirts and the side effects of the contraceptive pill to assemble a potent light-touch argument about modern femininity.
5. TJ and Dave (Soho theatre, London)
Taking improvised comedy into realms that few knew it could go, Chicago duo TJ Jagodowski and David Pasquesi are mesmerising to watch. Cool, calm, minutely detailed, they assemble whole comic plays on the hoof, dispensing entirely with the neediness and hyperactivity that some associate with impro. In Soho this spring, their made-up show about an office worker’s stunted relationship with his dad was a gem: drily funny, unshowily complex and ego-free.
4. John Robins (Pleasance, Edinburgh)
It’s quite a feat to be honest about the pain of a relationship breakdown and yet make hysterical comedy out of it. That’s what John Robins achieved with this joint winner of the Edinburgh comedy award, a self-lacerating show about being dumped (by fellow standup Sara Pascoe), bereft and broken-hearted, which salvaged extreme hilarity from extreme abjection. Its closing stages – a spoof building society ad taking snapshots across the four-year span of his love affair – were breathtaking.
3. Hannah Gadsby (Assembly George Square, Edinburgh)
This year, Aussie comic Hannah Gadsby announced she was quitting comedy – then won live comedy’s two biggest awards (in Melbourne and Edinburgh) for her final show. Nanette was electrifying: a post-comedic account of her lifetime’s experience of homophobia, gender violence and the lies she’s had to tell to make her life seem funny. It was droll when it needed to be, confrontational as hell, and demanded we be braver and truer about the stories we tell ourselves.
2. Mat Ewins (Heroes @ the Hive, Edinburgh)
The most uncomplicatedly silly comedy show of 2017, Adventureman 7 found DIY comic Ewins on superbly daft form. The fashion (slyly spoofed by Ewins) may be for the heartfelt and confessional but this is a celebration of idiocy, as our host – with the help of various gimcrack videos and digital cartoons – tells the ludicrous tale of a sub-Indiana Jones quest for a lost amulet, jokes crammed into every byway.
1. Frankie Boyle (EICC, Edinburgh)
For dark times, do we need dark comedy? Maybe, maybe not, but if you put a gun to my head (very much the apt figure of speech), I’d have to cite Frankie Boyle’s Prometheus Volume 1 as the funniest comedy show I saw this year. I tried to resist it. I listened to the angel at my shoulder, reminding me how much I enjoyed fun-lovers such as Spencer Jones and mild-mannered wags like Phil Wang. But in comedy as in music, sometimes the devil gets the best tunes. And this year, in his familiar guise as a beardie Glaswegian with middle-aged spread and a husk for a heart, Boyle had some crackers.
Depending on what you’re looking for, a lot and a little has changed since the shows with which Boyle began his standup career. He still aims to appal as much as amuse. If you think there are subjects from which comedy should shrink (sexual assault, to cite an obvious example), this wasn’t the show for you. But whereas shock and horror were once the means and the end of Boyle’s shtick, and were cheaply spent on snide gags about celebrities, now all the brutal quips about Tories, slaughtered Arabs and succubus Windsors are there in the service of a radical worldview. Radically cynical, maybe. Radically morbid. But radical nonetheless.
His comedy probably isn’t going to save us, of course. But at least, as the waters finally close over our benighted civilisation, Boyle’s cackling barbs ringing in our ears, we won’t be able to say we weren’t warned. In the meantime, well, the jokes are just so funny: pithily expressed, baroque of imagination, each one landing like a sharp jab at whatever nerve you’ve left unprotected. In a year when many of us felt like grabbing strangers by the lapels and screaming, “What’s happening to us?!”, Boyle’s comedy came closest to distilling that feeling into joke form.
