A personal rundown of the year's best live comedy

Okay let’s check the books here. Just as I thought, I caught 135 comedy shows this year. That may seem to you like much, much too much comedy, but it's actually down about 32 per cent on last year, which the stockholders (my wife) are pleased about. Of this dwindling handful, here are the best 20 comedy shows of 2025.

20. Jamie D’Souza: Brownie

D’Souza’s been bubbling under for a few years before coming out of the gates with this very strong set of likeable, low key PowerPoint stand-up. He may come across as mild-mannered on stage, but it takes an understated charisma to make such an impact. It’s a rare talent to make data analysis funny in the way he does.

19. Lara Ricote: I Don’t Know Anything Yet

Ever since her fantastic debut GRL/LTNX/DEF Ricote has been retreating from the straightforward into something weirder and more malleable. Her previous show bordered on improv when I saw it in its early stages, but this year’s Fringe preview synthesised those oddball tendencies with her innate star power and reminded me what was so exciting about her in 2022. Can’t wait for the finished version.

18. Alice Cockayne:  Licensed. Professional. Trained. Qualified.

Cockayne levelled up into one of our best character comedians this year, presenting a showcase of wild-eyed, intense characters that seem to trap you with them in their damaged headspace. Her affectless, uncanny brothel madam and the gothic, perpetually pregnant eternal mother are paragons of her modernistic sense of the macabre.

17. Roger O’Sullivan: Fekken

Picking up a very well deserved award nomination for his debut show, O’Sullivan combined tales of his Irish upbringing with a PS1-era graphical sensibility and a warm heart. What first seems like a dry and slightly disaffected performance style is put into service for a stealth tribute to his reticent father, carried along on the backs of a host of surprising and satisfying one liners.

16. Rosa Garland: Primal Bog

Seeing Rosa Garland perform naked and covered in orange slime for the first time at the Gutter Collective’s clowning night, it seemed inevitable that she would make a big splash. Even though her act is ostensibly some pretty avant-garde clowning, she has a broad and intrinsic comedic appeal that more than justifies the shock factor of her work. What was even more surprising was that her show Primal Bog was layered and coherent as well as transgressive and goofy.

15. Bella Hull: Doctors Hate Her

A perennial favourite for me, steadily improving her craft every year, Bella Hull now feels undeniable as a joke writer, and this show about refusing to settle and the gritted-teeth grimness of life after love is her best show yet, pinging with beautifully written jokes like popcorn in the microwave.

14. Henry Paker: Illustratinator

Having retired from stand-up, and then given himself a new lease of life on Three Bean Salad, Henry Paker is now returning to the stage with a whole hour of illustration-based comedy, developing an idea he introduced almost seven years ago in Man Alive. The result is a combination of improvisation, stand-up, and live doodling on a jerry-rigged OHP. This work in progress was still pleasingly a little shambolic when I last saw it, but the looseness suits him well. It’s thrilling to see him back in action.

13. Dan Rath: Tropical Depression

What more can I say about Dan Rath, probably my favourite working comedian, as he continues to hammer out hours of astringent gold year after year. Pitch black, blithely suicidal, dissolving in society’s acid but not making a big deal about it, no one has a mind like his. Eye contact is a crutch for lesser comedians.

12. Bebe Cave: Christbride

The spirit of Airplane! is alive and well in Bebe Cave’s harebrained medieval spoof, a handmade blockbuster production that sees Cave playing dozens of roles at breakneck speed, and cramming daft jokes into every available corner. You might call it a satire of anachronistic period romances like Bridgerton, and it is that, but it’s a hundred other things as well.

11. Rob Duncan: Printer of the Year 2024

My favourite clown has surpassed himself this year and produced his best solo work yet, a show about brotherhood, being abandoned and making it on your own, that managed to find distinct notes of pathos despite Duncan being accompanied on stage by his new comedy sidekick – eight ageing home office printers that relentlessly print meaningless phrases throughout the hour.

10. Nick Mohammed as Mr Swallow in Show Pony

It’s been gratifying to hear that the nation has now fallen in love with Nick Mohammed via Celebrity Traitors, especially as he seems to be in a creative purple patch right now, and hopefully in a good position to capitalise. This big tent tour show brought together everything great about his Mr Swallow character – the giddiness, the speed, the genuinely impressive magic and the outrageous laugh rate – for something that felt like a proper escalation and encapsulation of what makes Mohammed so special.

9. Elouise Eftos: Australia’s First Attractive Comedian

The trickiest, most debate-sparking show of the year and a real case of ‘a star is born’ for Eftos, who blasted into the Fringe’s best newcomer nominations on the strength of clever writing and outrageous performance chops (the impressions, the physical comedy, the character work, all of it!) Eftos holds her audience in a steady, gorgonesque gaze while deconstructing human attraction and the many weird ways it intersects with being a woman in comedy.

8. Johnny White Really-Really:am / pm

In any year when he comes out with a new show, Johnny White is always a highlight. While other comedians try and hype you up with relatable stories of watching TV and drinking too much, White is emitting a soothing aura while telling you about a pack of haunted playing cards that he lost somewhere on the lizard peninsula. Comedy by, for, and about will o’ the wisps.

7. Patti Harrison: Don’t Ask

We never got to properly review this series of shows that Harrison performed over the summer, first at Soho Theatre and then in a limited Fringe run, and perhaps a review wouldn’t have made sense anyway, as she had a different guest and presumably different material every night. The night I went, she had James Acaster on stage for almost 90 minutes and spent the entire time ripping the piss out of him about Off Menu, including making him sit through an extended bizarro version of his own format. The beautiful thing about live comedy is that it’s unique every time, but this show was more unique than most, if that’s linguistically possible.

6. Luke McQueen: Comedian’s Comedian

It’s exciting when an established act has a creative breakthrough, especially someone like McQueen, who’s always been tremendously talented but delights in deliberately alienating his audience. For this show, assisted by a monstrous AI Stuart Goldsmith, McQueen turns the alienation inwards, creating a lacerating environment of self-recrimination and self-doubt, while turning in one of the funniest and most hair-raising stand-up performances of the year. Soothing Sounds for Baby in hell.

5. Ian Smith: Foot Spa Half Empty

Simply the best pure stand-up act in the UK, Ian Smith once again spins petty anxieties and minor inconveniences into indisputable gold. Having had a good year is no setback, as it just means his trials and tribulations have become objectively less important, and this is the zone in which Smith thrives. You have to go see him if you can, and bring whoever you like; they’re guaranteed to enjoy it. He’s a case study in how an hour of massive but inconsequential laughs can end up feeling transcendent.

4. Sam Nicoresti: Baby Doomer

In all my meagre successes and many failures trying to predict the outcome of the Edinburgh Comedy Awards, I’ve never felt this locked-in about a show from so early on, but you only have to see a few minutes of Baby Doomer to recognise it as an inevitable smash hit. After one of her most esoteric, ambitious projects in Wokeflake, here Nicoresti knuckled down and cranked up the gas for a white hot hour of banger jokes about her life as a newly-out trans woman, pitched to the back of the room.

3. The Mayor and His Daughter: A Genuine Appreciation of Comedy

Deep within a ruined future England, in a village haunted by demonic pigs, Ciaran Chillingworth and Kit Finnie have found a DVD of Russell Howard’s Good News in the smouldering wreckage of a burned-out house, and have realised that only comedy can save Albion. From this premise, the duo have created their demented, cultish debut hour of sketch comedy, where every subsequent sketch is a subversion of what’s come before. Appreciation of this show is definitely a wavelength thing, but if you catch that wave you’ll surf to places beyond imagining.

2. Sean Morley: Backchannel

This was a hugely welcome return to stand-up from the elusive Morley, one of our country’s greatest minds, back after a hiatus in the Netherlands. This work-in-progress show played for only three nights at the Fringe but was up there with the most exciting things I saw all year. Opening with a white-knuckle empathy simulator in which Morley undergoes a preventable tragedy live on stage, this WIP turned into a brilliantly funny examination of the comedian’s relationship with his audience, enabled by a simple mechanism that allows us to feed back on his performance anonymously in real time. Time will tell if this is an incredibly bad idea.

1. Ayoade Bamgboye: Swings and Roundabouts

The longer this one percolates, the more significant it feels. And how much stand-up can you say that about? Bamgboye’s subtly mind-boggling debut hour is an introduction to a unique comedic voice, and has plenty of great stand-up contained within, but what sticks with you is the witch’s brew of modernity and mysticism. Bamgboye is the precocious child of at least two contemporary cultures, with many salient insights on love, family and identity, but she also takes comedy back to the realm of mythic trickster figures, with her voice, her personas, and her perspectives sliding and eliding all over the place. It’s beyond exciting to find yourself ensorcelled by someone at such an early stage in their career – think of what’s to come!

Published: 31 Dec 2025