Alexander Bennett is at the Edinburgh Fringe performing his stand-up show I Can’t Stand The Man, Myself at Gilded Balloon at The Patter Hoose at 9pm. Here he picks his comedy favourites.

Norm MacDonald

Always had the most interesting angle on something, he was detached but reactive, used the best archaic language and crude slang, was the smartest and stupidest person in the room and his delivery gets me every time.

Norm MacDonald had a really interesting delivery style of under and over-selling jokes, hitting things just too hard or not hard enough. In this list I've tried to write about things that genuinely make me laugh out loud, and MacDonald really, really does. He also often balanced darkness and silliness, which is really what I love.

Arrested Development Series 1 - 3

For my money, the funniest American TV show ever. Every character is absurd and bursting with brilliant lines performed by an absolutely amazing cast, Jessica Walter as Lucille, the dark heart of the family, being my favourite (a character and performance so excellent the TV show Archer basically lifted it wholesale).

So silly that it is has seemingly made people forget it is a blistering satire of American society, the wealthy and political and business dynasties. The newer series didn't measure up at all, but the first three are hilarious, and so influential.

Johnny Vegas

Emotional pain is funny. Vegas has a better hold on that than just about anyone. There's a pervasive misunderstanding about comedy that it's all about logic, because lots of things to do with crafting comedy are about playing with logic (joke construction, show structure etc). I think it's actually about emotion, playing with it, creating it, pulling logic out of it and destroying logic with it. Vegas is so raw, so funny, so present, so funny.

Suzy Eddie ​Izzard

I'm very suspicious when anyone tells me an act is doing something totally unique and different, because I invariably go and see them and go ‘It's good, but it is just x comedian plus y comedian via z comedian'. In all the years I've been watching comedy, Helen Duff and Phil Jarvis are the only people I think I've seen where I've thought 'oh this is actually new'.

This is not a bad thing, because my feeling is that originality comes from self-exploration rather than formal experimentation - but people doing new things deserve credit, and when Izzard broke in the 1990s I think she was genuinely original, all the comparisons to Python were lazy, it was something else, she was absolutely hilarious and made maybe 2 or 3 of the best stand-up specials ever. Izzard, Dylan Moran and Jack Dee got me into stand-up.

Dylan Moran in Birmingham some 12-13 years ago

So, I'm a teenager, and I go and see Dylan Moran at the Alexandra (1,300 capacity). The crowd was shit, I'd say maybe 15 per cent of them turned up late and awkwardly shuffled to their seats, disrupting most of the first 20 minutes of the show. Moran was also dealing, extremely politely, with a group on the front who are chatting constantly.

25 minutes in, just when the latecomers have all settled in, he calls an early interval. After the interval, he opens by politely saying the group at the front have been made to leave and asks us to not talk or disrupt the show. Silence. One person in the gods coughs. Moran says: 'That's not a proper cough, you're just coughing because you feel awkward"" and then has ten minutes of brilliant gear on coughs and his memories of his relatives coughing.

He does another 30. He gets enough applause to justify an encore. It's great. He does 15 minutes and goes to leave. The applause is so loud he doesn't bother leaving the stage, signals to the tech to cut the music and does a second encore of probably the best 20 minutes of stand-up I've ever seen. Skill, wit, imagination, performance, crowd control, patience and nerve.

The Alternative Comedy Memorial Society

Just a load of pretentious twats fucking about. It's brilliant.It's about trying something new and being allowed to fail. If you feel free to fail, you can achieve anything.