Mitch Benn celebrates Rik Mayall as he picks his Perfect Playlist

Mitch Benn is one of the comedians taking part in the Rik ​Mayall Comedy Festival in Droitwich, where the Young Ones comedy legend grew up, from May 31. Here he recalls his Perfect Playlist of comedy favourites. 

Bambi: The Young Ones, series 2 episode 1

This might sound like a sop to the fact that this is a plug for RikFest but the whole reason I wanted to DO RikFest is that - and I don’t think I realised it until Rik died in 2014 - when I was a teenager in the 1980s, Rik, Ade and the gang were my rock stars. 

At the age when you’re supposed to be obsessed with a particular band and feverishly awaiting their new album, I was obsessed with the Young Ones/Comic Strip crew and feverishly awaiting their new show.

I think this really started with The Young Ones series 2. I was 12 when series 1 went out and if I’m honest a lot of it went over my head. But I was 14 and a half when series 2 started and it was like a comedy missile laser-targeted at my funny receptors. I remember watching it at home in Liverpool and laughing so hard I genuinely thought I’d ruptured something. 

An Audience With Billy ​Connolly (ITV 1985)

I rewatched this about a month ago and the only thing that’s dated about it is the 1985 ‘celebrity’ audience; watching it now it’s hard to concentrate on the material while you’re constantly thinking ‘Who’s he now hang on wasn’t he the no wait he was the guy who was in that thing…’

I once defined observational comedy (which Billy and his fellow ex-folk club raconteurs introduced into British stand-up when they emerged in the early 70s) as ‘telling them what they didn’t know they knew’. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in this TV special. 

Billy is recounting the specifics of his own life and background but by tapping into the commonalities of existence it feels like he’s telling you about YOUR life. In particular, the director can’t resist cutting to Robbie Coltrane’s reactions. To see that powerhouse of comedy utterly helpless with mirth is a joyous thing to behold. 

Tom Lehrer Revisited (1960)

I stumbled across this, Tom’s second live album, on the flip side of a cassette (Google it, jenzies) a friend had lent to me. I was engrossed; the bleakness of much of the humour, the musicality (so many comedy songs regard the melody as purely a delivery system for lyrical gags and are musically uninteresting as a result) and above all, the syllable-torturing rhymes… I assumed I was listening to something contemporary (it was 1984) until my mum came in and said: ‘Tom Lehrer! Your dad and I saw him at the Liverpool Empire in 1962…’

When I got into stand up in the mid 90s, I incorporated music because it never really occurred to me not to. In the very early days I did what most ‘guitar comics’ do and wrote funny words to existing op tunes, but it soon dawned on me that this was a bit of a dead end career-wise because you need up dependent upon material that you don’t own the copyright to… 

So if I were to make a serious go of this comedy lark I needed to write original songs, tune and all. And Tom Lehrer instantly sprang to mind.

Tom has been a standard I aspire to rather than a direct inspiration; someone to emulate rather than imitate (although I do occasionally write something Lehreresque). He’s 97 now and as reclusive and irascible as he’s been since about 1966, but a few years ago he rescinded his own copyrights and made his whole catalogue public domain.

So my Edinburgh show this year is The Lehrer Effect, looking at the debt musical comedy in general and I in particular owe him. ‘Preserving the legacy of Tom Lehrer whether he likes it or not’. 4pm Underbelly Bristo Square.

Tim ​Vine (in general)

There are cleverer comedians than Tim Vine. There are more innovative comedians than Tim Vine. There are more incisive comedians than Tim Vine. But no comedian has ever made me LAUGH more than Tim Vine. Purely in terms of sheer volume of air expelled from my lungs through laughter, Tim is in the lead.

I first saw him in a tiny cabaret at Edinburgh in 1995. I’d heard the name but didn’t know what to expect. On he came, all nervous smile and jittery energy. Then he cracked a dreadful pun. Then another one. Then three more in rapid succession… After a while I realised that I wasn’t laughing at his genuinely terrible jokes any more, I was laughing at how much I was laughing at his terrible jokes. Thus Tim’s now legendary laughter-crap gag feedback loop was established and soon I was literally gasping for breath. 

This also means that Tim always knows when I’m in the audience. I attended the recording of his live video last year. Afterwards in the bar he looked at me and said ‘Rear stalls; stage left’. He was right. 

Life Of Brian

Obvious, I know, but I’m here to be honest rather than make myself look cool and esoteric, and besides, Life Of Brian, is, in my view, UNDERrated for all that it’s (now) universally acknowledged as a classic.

Thing is, even people who love LoB don’t always get just how good it is, or rather how it’s good (ie. the WAYS in which it’s good). Watch it again: pretty much every scene has some sort of point to make, whether it’s about blind adherence to dogma, the abuse of authority, pious hypocrisy, allowing petty schisms to impede progress… It’s all ABOUT things, and yet it’s got a denser gags-per-minute rate than Airplane or The Naked Gun.

If you can fill your story with philosophical musings AND fill your philosophical musings with silly jokes, you’re unstoppable. The Pythons’ masterpiece. 

Rik Mayall at Comic Relief, 1986

Yeah, let’s top and tail it with Rik, why not, right kids?

Rik Mayall’s ‘opening number’ at the very first Comic Relief gala in 1986 is still possibly the single funniest thing that’s ever happened. 

Hurtling onstage in his Rick from the Young Ones costume (the others would be along in due course) but apparently playing a strange fusion of Rick and his priapic sex-crazed Flashheart from Blackadder, Rik launches into a frenzied mash-up cover of The Contours’ Do You Love Me and Wilson Pickett’s Land of 1,000 Dances, during which he runs around the stage threatening to expose various bits of himself to the audience.

That’s it. That’s literally it. And it’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. It happened nearly 40 years ago, I’ve watched it hundreds of times and it’s STILL the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t even begin to tell you why; it shouldn’t be, it REALLY shouldn’t still be, but it’s THE funniest thing I’ve ever seen.

Rik Mayall’s comic genius was all the more extraordinary for being all but inexplicable: you couldn’t really tell WHY he was funny; he just was. SO bloody funny. 

I’m glad to do my bit to preserve his memory.

•  Click here for details of Benn’s shows at the Rik ​Mayall Comedy Festival, which runs from May 31 to June 7. His show The Lehrer Effect will be on at Underbelly Bristo Square at 4pm during the Edinburgh Fringe.

Published: 12 May 2025