Humphrey Ker and his longtime Penny Dreadfuls collaborator David Reed star in Sherlock Holmes And The 12 Days of Christmas at the Birmingham Rep from tomorrow.  Here Ker, also known as community director of Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney’s beloved football team in Welcome to Wrexham, shares his Perfect Playlist of favourite comedies…

Stavros Halkias

Currently my stand-up flavour du jour. First encountered him via the mighty algorithm on TikTok or Instagram, not sure which. 

He is a refreshing antidote to the manosphere world of right-leaning male comics proliferating in America. He is scurrilous, hilarious and abrasive, but underpinned with a warmth, generosity and humanity so absent in those who decided it was counter-culture to start punching down. 

His most recent show, The Dreamboat Tour is one of the funniest hours I’ve ever seen. Delighted to see he is now starting to get his flowers as an actor as well. Very funny man and a good person, too.

Spaced

Spaced completely blew my mind when I first started watching it on DVD at university. The bravado of Edgar Wright’s direction, combined with the sheer number of laughs, references and a series of performances that launched the cast into the comedy stratosphere. 

I still involuntarily mutter ‘The gay club?!’ under my breath whenever anyone mentions Heaven. 

I have probably ripped more joke structures off from this show than anything else I have magpied from in my career. I don’t think I’ve ever loved, nor more wanted to be friends with, a group of characters as much as this one. 

If I ever need to summon happy tears, I simply stick on Lemon Jelly’s The Staunton Lick and away I go.

Derry Girls

Speaking of crying at the end of sitcoms, while I must, of course, mention Blackadder, which also had an extraordinary influence over me and my career, I was near inconsolable at the end of Derry Girls. 

My wife came home and found me in such a state that she immediately burst into tears in shock and fear that something had happened to the dog. It wasn’t only the end of the best sitcom of the last ten years, but the message the whole show had encapsulated: the power of love and hope and striving for peace. 

My family are from the other side of the political and religious divide in Northern Ireland, though I have never lived there, and I have always been fascinated by the history and depiction of the troubles. Plus, it’s gloriously, ecstatically funny. Not only are the central cast amazing, but it has some of the greatest second tier characters in sitcom history – special shoutouts to Uncle Colm, Jenny Joyce and Dennis from the shop, as personal favourites.

Paul F. Tompkins

Paul is the second American stand-up to appear in my list of delights, but I have been living in the States for 12 years so get off my back. 

He is, as is often the way over in the US, a performer of many parts. Stand-up, podcaster, actor, voiceover artist, he is, I think pound-for-pound the funniest person in the world.

 His stand-up specials are all excellent, displaying his mastery of a wide array of comic techniques, from command of language and the acutest observation to doing silly voices. He is an exceptional improviser and his appearances as a dizzying array of characters on the long-running Comedy Bang Bang podcast – not least of all as Dame Sir Andrew Lloyd-Webber, a grotesque parody of our greatest living tunesmith – are some of my most treasured comedic memories.

Terry Pratchett’s Men At Arms

Honourable mention to PG Wodehouse, of course, when it comes to mentioning the best humour fiction in the English language, but the first Discworld novel I read is indelibly inked into my consciousness. 

Part high fantasy, part satire, dripping in references and jokes and humanity, Men At Arms delighted 12-year-old me and birthed a lifelong love of all those things. I will still, to this day, see an old noir movie or read a snippet of some Great Work and find the origins of characters or jokes from Pratchett’s meisterwerk. 

The book centres on the dysfunctional officers and hard-boiled commander of the  City Watch of teeming fantasy metropolis Ankh-Morpork, as they try to track down an assassin armed with a terrifying new piece of technology: a gun. 

It is an extraordinary treatise on multi-culturalism, technology, story-telling, society, and more. I have derived pretty much all of my personal philosophy on life from Pratchett’s books.

Anna and Katy

I came up through the Edinburgh Fringe maelstrom at a time of many brilliant sketch teams and double acts, but my favourite to watch, bar none, were Anna Crilly and Katy Wix, who consistently, across a number of Fringe shows and their way too short-lived Channel 4 series made me laugh like a drain. 

I will always remember the Casualty sketches, where seemingly banal situations like the awarding of flower show prizes would descend into blood-soaked madness and their cod-German TV shows sketches remain absolute favourites. They are both such brilliant performers and went on to great and glorious things in their acting careers, but they were dynamite together. Those were the days.

• For more details of Sherlock Holmes And The 12 Days of Christmas, visit the Birmingham Rep website.