Edinburgh Fringe performer Max Fulham picks his comedy favourites

Comedy ventriloquist Max Fulham makes his Edinburgh Fringe debut this year with his Pleasance show Full of Ham. Here he picks his Perfect Playlist of comedy favourites:

Bob Blackman: Mule Train

I cannot remember when I first saw this, but it remains one of my favourite old school variety oddities. It’s a man, Bob Blackman, belting out a song, Mule Train, which is punctuated by him hitting himself over the head with a tray. It is stupid, but so well done; the perfect tray whacking at the perfect moments. Just when the initial amusement is dying down, he starts tray-slapping double-time (incredible leg action).

When rewatching the clip for Perfect Playlist, I noticed the joyous bouncy jig he is doing whilst singing between tray thwacking which I had never appreciated before. I also noticed the shot at the end of a largely unbothered looking audience! Oh! Those were the days of variety where a man singing and whacking himself on the head was just run-of-the-mill entertainment!

Terri Rogers

Terri Rogers is one of my ventriloquial idols! An elegantly dressed, well-spoken woman with a foul-mouthed acerbic dummy - a perfect combination! I have pored over every bit of footage I can find of her and wish I could have had the chance to see her perform live. It would have been amazing to meet Terri, and though I was unable to do that, I have been lucky enough to meet her sidekick Shorty Harris.

Her version of the dead cat joke is so brilliantly performed in this video from The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, her timing and acting is superb. If ever I’m dealing with a difficult, rowdy crowd and have to unleash the puppet on them, so to speak, I often think of Terri who would expertly handle stag and working men’s club audiences around the UK with Shorty.

Terri was a trans woman which only increases my admiration for her considering the venues she played in the era that she did, but also the complexity and genius that it added to her ventriloquism. The pitch of Shorty’s voice was closer to Terri’s natural pitch which means as well as focussing on the voice of the dummy she was also modulating her own voice simultaneously!

Shooting Stars

The first series of Shooting Stars I saw was the relaunch with Jack Dee and Angelos Epithemiou and I was hooked from the moment that little animated rabbit darted across the screen to the Big Brass theme tune. There is something so funny about watching celebrities out of the context they are usually in, and I love the absurd chaos Vic and Bob plunged their guests into. 

Vic and Bob sitting at a desk is such an iconic image to me and I didn’t realise it had been such a feature of their work until I started watching all their other shows before Shooting Stars. It is the perfect set up to reach for a frying pan to hit someone with or a row of shoes on a plank of wood to use as panpipes.

Shooting Stars is phenomenal in every aspect: its pastiche of the gameshow format, the sheer amount of brilliant material from songs to sketches, and the fact that it looked like so much fun. It feels like TV hasn’t quite been able to tap into that hysterical anarchy in quite the same way since.

Sorry I’ve Got No Head

This must have been one of the first TV shows that made me fall in love with comedy. Sorry I’ve Got No Head was a CBBC sketch show that became appointment viewing in the Fulham household. We would sit down in the living room every whatever-day-they-used-to-broadcast-it and laugh for half an hour straight. 

The thing that set it apart for me was that it didn’t feel like comedy aimed at kids, yes it was silly and yes there were farts (specifically every time a certain character said blueberries) but eight-year-old me felt like he was watching the ‘proper’ grown-up comedy that he was so desperate to watch.

It was a show made by the people who were making the comedy for the adults, and that's why it worked so well. Writers who were also writing sketches for Mitchell and Webb and a cast that included Mel Giedroyc, Anna Crilly, Marcus Brigstocke and Nick Mohammed amongst many others. 

This clip is a mini sketch of Marek Larwood with remote control legs. He was always one of my favourites in the show and I wanted to be able to do funny faces as well as he could. I vividly remember this sketch and trying to replicate it myself

Frisky And Mannish

I love it when people with immense skill and talent use their powers for laughs and I feel like that is exactly what Frisky and Mannish did whilst twisting, dissecting and colliding pop songs but with stunning vocals and expert musicianship. The first thing I saw of theirs was the Kate Bash song and was an immediate fan. It’s a Kate Bush and Kate Nash mashup which combines Wuthering Heights and Foundations. It’s ridiculous.

They have multiple full shows on YouTube, and I binge them all at least once a year (Frisky and Mannish marathon highly recommended). Their work is gloriously camp, incredibly funny and has an inviting and Electric Cabaret atmosphere.

The Stalker Medley is a firm favourite of mine and a great example of what they do; every noise and facial expression is amusing. Repeat viewings of it have also meant I will no longer hear any of the original songs in the way they were intended ever again, and I wish the same fate upon you.

Harry Hill Live (1995)

Harry Hill is one of my all-time favourite comedians. He is a master of the ridiculous, combining riotous silliness with some of the best jokes ever written. I think people can be very quick to dismiss and underestimate silliness, but I feel Harry Hill is proof of the genius it takes to create it. 

As a child I adored his children’s book Tim The Tiny Horse (I really must dig it out and read it again). I also got his joke book for my birthday one year and read it cover to cover multiple times, memorising a lot of the gags.

My main introduction to Harry Hill though was TV Burp, which was so densely packed with laughs and provided the nation with many phrases, some of which you still hear today (see: ‘ear cataracts?!’, ‘Chippy chips’  and, of course, ‘FIGHT!’).

One of the things I love most when I watch Harry Hill’s stand up is the way he plays with structure. He flings out multiple joke setups with no indication as to when the punchlines will fall (or in what order). I watched his most recent tour, and some jokes were set up in the first half and completed in the second.

I think the fact that the audience have to hold on to these incomplete concepts in their heads make the laughs even stronger when the moment of connection happens unexpectedly down the line.  Among  the set-ups and punchlines that he keeps firing out, there are also repeated movement, phrases, and refrains of popular songs, all chucked into the mix for good measure.

It was great to read about how this style evolved in his book Fight, which also contains some of the best advice on how to become a comedian I have ever read.

Harry Hill also has an immense appreciation of old variety entertainment and music hall, from eccentric dance to ventriloquism. His puppet characters like Stouffer the cat and Gary (his son from his first marriage) who is an old antique ventriloquist dummy, fantastically send up the art form. I could watch any of his standup shows but have chosen this Harry Hill – Live show as I believe it was his first recorded special. (It also includes the iconic Beds Beds Beds joke)

• Max Fulham: Full of Ham is on at 6.40pm in Pleasance Courtyard during the Edinburgh Fringe

Published: 6 Aug 2025