From lyrical, poetic hours of stand-up to two-minute TikToks about butts...

Ben Pope picks his Perfect Playlist of comedy favourites

This list was actually quite physically painful to write. There are glaring omissions. Mike Birbiglia, whose heartfelt, structured shows I have pored over pretty exhaustively and whose podcast single-handedly stopped me from quitting comedy during the pandemic. Simon Amstell, whose show Do Nothing had a profound effect on me as a teenager and showed me comedy could be tender and emotional and that was actually its strength. The Pajama Men, Demetri Martin, Tim Minchin, Jess Fostekew’s perfect line, quoting her son having a tantrum: I don’t want what I want!'

Well, I’ve always wanted to do one of these Perfect Playlists. But now, faced with having to winnow down the comedy touchstones I care about to just six, perhaps I too don’t actually want what I want.

Here’s what I could manage…

Dylan Moran: Monster

This is it. This is the urtext from which everything I do as a comedian comes. Impossible to overstate how important this show is to me. I watched it for the first time at the age of 14 and I’ve watched it countless times since.

The burbling stream of colliding images (swimming knives! farts clothed in substance! fried nuns!), laterally-coined thoughts, opinions and theories that blossom and collapse under the weight of their own drunk logic, all delivered in the faux-sozzled delivery that makes it all seem like a perfect accident - it’s magic.

Elsewhere, my peers were drooling over The Mighty Boosh and Shooting Stars. But to me all that random surrealist whimsy seemed, at the time, pointless. Whereas Moran lobbed these poetic koans at you and each one, though you could never express it like that in a million years yourself, felt like something you’d known forever. Every time I start writing new material from scratch I come back here for inspiration. What would Dylan do?

Bill Bailey: Part Troll

Thank God for Channel 4. In the years 2007 to 2011 they seemed to be broadcasting stand-up shows at a mad rate of knots - and, home from school, spread-eagled on the sofa, I hoovered up every single one. And it started here.

At school, I was just starting to act in plays, I was training as a classical musician, and had just discovered the comedy repository that is Radio 4. Bailey, with his quiet showmanship and casual musical nous, seemed to be a perfect Venn diagram of all those things. Something about this leftfield, noodling, playful show just turned an obsessive comedy on-switch somewhere in the pink mush of my brain. No one’s found the off-switch since.

Tig Notaro: The Chair Routine

Sometimes it’s good to watch acts who do things you could never do. Tonally, I could never emulate Notaro’s dry-as-a-bone delivery - I’m a blabbermouth and crucially I crave the audience’s validation too much - much less do I have the confidence to pare back stand-up to just noises like this. It’s such a gamble! And to do it on television!

But it’s a perfect example of an iconic routine that reminds you what we’re doing up there. We’re on that stage with nothing but a few pieces of furniture to make hysteria out of nothing. And make hysteria Notaro does.

I can’t get over how funny this is. It’s that kind of laughter you do when you shouldn’t at church, or with your craziest friends long after the joke is over. There’s so much to learn here: about poise, confidence, and rolling the dice.

John Mulaney: The Comeback Kid

Everyone loves Mulaney. And it may be a fairly mainstream choice. But what I don’t think he gets enough credit for is his storytelling chops. Nowhere is that more in evidence than in The Comeback Kid. His early shows are glorious but his personality isn’t wholly minted yet. His Radio City show is grand and showy, but you can sort of feel the cocaine in it, skimming little stones rather than landing dunks.

By Baby J his accelerated level of fame skews the pitch somehow. But The Comeback Kid catches him just at that moment when his talent, his image and his popularity are blossoming simultaneously. It’s full of killer, dense, sturdy routines. And it ends with perhaps my favourite stand-up story of all time - the time he, as a child, met Bill Clinton.

Every line has a juicy laugh. The events of the story are wild and fascinating enough to build momentum and end a whole hour. He does a stand-up move I’ve not seen many other acts pull off – a full, fake-out digression about the movie The Fugitive. He lands one delicious callback about his father. (Proof if ever it were needed that, if you can find the right callback, you only ever need one).

I can watch it and listen to it again and again. A grandstanding bit of craftsmanship.

Key & Peele

As a lapsed sketch comedian, there are plenty of sketch shows that have left a dent over the years, and perhaps I should be repping UK sketch more.

But like cricket and beer, sketch comedy is one of those things that was ‘invented’ over here but, if we’re honest, has been perfected elsewhere.

Have I ever seen a full episode of Key & Peele? No. Would I even know where to look for them? No! But thanks to YouTube, I’ve been returning to their absolutely immaculate sketches for a decade in awe. Yes, their impressions are brilliant, and their production values are enviable (proof that if you throw some money at sketch comedy it can be f*cking incredible - I’m talking to you, British TV industry!) - but for me it’s the writing.

Premises pay off delightfully! Stakes rise dramatically! Reveals are genuinely surprising! The Continental Breakfast one I’ve chosen here might be my favourite piece of comedy ever?

Tom Cardy: H.Y.C.Y.BH

The bits on this list largely appear in the chronological order in which I discovered them. And what an indictment on my attention span that we go from lyrical, poetic hours of stand-up to two-minute TikToks about butts. But nonetheless...

A lot of the other stuff on this listicle is stuff I rate for its content but also for its style, structure and elan. But what actually really makes me lose it? If I’m honest, this video by Australian musician Tom Cardy in which he seriously asks people who have lost stuff whether they’ve checked their bumholes.

It is perfectly puerile, and also for me is the apotheosis of internet comedy in which immense resources are poured into making detailed, beautiful, immaculate jokes about the stupidest stuff imaginable. Witness the whipcrack sound effects! The cowbell! The perfectly escalating club banger drop! I’m obsessed.