As she returns to the Edinburgh Fringe, Caitriona Dowden picks her comedy favourites…

John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme

I discovered Radio 4 comedy when I was a teenager and became completely obsessed. I think it was around this time that many of my peers were discovering alcohol and parties, and I definitely don’t have any regrets about how I spent my one precious youth. 

One of my favourite sketch shows was (and is) John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme. It definitely shaped my understanding of how to craft comedy - Finnemore structures everything that he writes with astonishing precision (his recent pivot into the world of puzzling makes complete sense), with unexpected through-lines and callbacks that feel effortless. 

I should say it’s not just well-structured, it is also imaginative and charmingly funny. One of my favourites is a sketch about a group of goldfish trying to ask Neptune for a better memory:

Heidi Regan’s BBC New Comedy Award set

Radio 4 was also broadcasting a lot of stand-up competitions at the time, and I started to follow them as if they were the Premier League. 

Heidi Regan’s winning set in the 2017 BBC New Comedy Awards was a revelation, and one of the first things that made me want to try stand-up myself. I loved the idea that comedy can come from mining a niche obsession that no one else has dedicated as much thought to as you have, and from looking at the world slightly askew.

 It’s also basically a perfect five minutes of stand-up, with not a single word wasted. Heidi remains one of my favourite comedians. Her writing is so tight, and she has a knack for blending the absurd with the mundane, presenting leftfield premises (such as a plan for deradicalising baby Hitler through the power of television) in a completely matter-of-fact way.

What We Do in the Shadows 

I was recently asked to choose a film that had shaped my sense of humour to screen at the Oxford Comedy Festival, and this was the first that came to mind. 

It’s another one I watched for the first time as a teenager, and it was different from any comedy I’d seen before. I really liked the way Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement had interwoven the surreal and supernatural with the mundanity of life in a flatshare, and it made me realise that comedy doesn’t have to be theatrical, it can also be awkward, off-beat, and deadpan. 

The film was also made in quite an unorthodox way. They filmed hours and hours of improv before cutting it down into a story, and the man who played Stu (a human software analyst whom the vampires adopt) was not an actor, but a friend hired to work on IT for the film. 

He agreed to be in a few scenes and assumed that he’d be a bit part until he saw the film at Sundance and realised that he was essentially the main character. It all comes together to create something that feels understated yet completely unique.

Stath Lets Flats

Stath Lets Flats is perhaps in a similar vein to WWDITS, with so much of the comedy coming from awkwardness and idiosyncrasy rather than from straightforward punchlines. I think it’s one of the greatest sitcoms of all time. 

Quite a lot of my Fringe show this year is about the trials of renting, but I don’t think that anyone will write better comedy on the subject than Jamie Demetriou. Whenever I wonder why a letting agent isn’t responding to an urgent maintenance request, I imagine that they must be training for an inter-agency football match or attempting to clear out a derelict garden one leaf at a time. 

Stath Lets Flats is so completely original and Demetriou’s use of language is borderline Shakespearean (eg ‘this floor is made of slips’). My only complaint is that by the end of series three, I had actually started to empathise with a group of letting agents, which is antithetical to my morals.  

Jordan Brookes: Fontanelle

I saw this show several times at the Fringe in 2024 and still think about it regularly. 

In the live version (slightly different from the YouTube recording) Jordan would initially sing solo snippets from a Titanic musical, before abruptly returning to stand-up. I’d seen an early work in progress in which the joke was that he was playing an extra in the musical, so we would only ever get the occasional line or dance move. I’d enjoyed that iteration of the show, and assumed that the finished version would be more of the same. 

Then, bit by bit, a full cast of actors was revealed, emerging from backstage to harmonise on increasingly elaborate musical numbers, and the show became something completely unexpected and unforgettable. 

I love comedy that can be thought-provoking and philosophical without spoon-feeding you the subtext, and Jordan is so good at creating surprisingly profound moments out of the grotesque and absurd – I don’t think many comics could explore themes of masculinity, vulnerability and our relationship to tragedy so thoughtfully by singing about a (SPOILER) vagina-shaped dildo, or pretending to penetrate the top of their own heads.

Horrible Histories

As someone who grew up in the 2000s and now writes comedy about the Middle Ages, I couldn’t not mention Horrible Histories. 

One of my most treasured childhood memories is coming home from school to watch the very first episode, which culminated with four King Georges performing as a Westlife-style boyband. 

It felt like they set out to make actually good comedy rather than just educational content, and it was never patronising. Not only is it the sole reason that I know all of the kings and queens of England in order since William the Conqueror, it also taught me a lot about how comedy writing works (and that it can be about 13^th-century nuns if you want it to be).

• Caitriona Dowden: Sesh Head is on at PBH's Free Fringe @ Carbon at 5pm from Saturday